


Mere Glimmering and Decay

by Blueinkedfrost



Series: Some call it herb-of-grace... [2]
Category: Baldur's Gate
Genre: Adventure, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-21
Updated: 2011-03-01
Packaged: 2017-10-13 22:45:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 77,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/142548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blueinkedfrost/pseuds/Blueinkedfrost
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was an Attic challenge for Romance Wot Should Or Ought Not To Be. This is a fic about those halcyon days of early adventuring from Candlekeep...with a certain amount of Xzar. Likely to end.  Unlikely to End Well.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_Summary_ : There was an Attic challenge for Romance Wot Should Or Ought Not To Be. This is a fic about those halcyon days of early adventuring from Candlekeep...with a certain amount of Xzar. Unlikely to End Well.

First part originally posted on the Attic 10/04/10. Title lifted from a poem by Henry Vaughan.

—

The halfling regularly made veiled and less-veiled threats to slit all their throats as they slept; the wizard was at least partially insane, and a necromancer who showed excessive interest in his work to boot; Prudence's foster sister and her father's trusted acquaintances found the pair suspicious indeed. They were also still the most interesting people she had met since leaving Candlekeep, and she was doing her best to suppress Jaheira's obvious distrust. (And to avoid giving Montaron watch duties by himself.)

"Cities. The prey is so easy to find." Prudence had already noticed a display of uncharacteristic clumsiness from Montaron, bumping into a wealthy-appearing villager—and the clink of gold pieces in his hands. Like Imoen, he had clear talent as a thief. She'd better responsibly make up for that at some point.

( _Thieving is less wrong than many other things._ She counted her sister's guardian Winthrop—a former rogue—a foster uncle; the profession was an adventurer's standard.)

"I don't mean to sound c-confrontational, but w-would you m-mind being a little less...evil?"

"Be warned—lest ye gauge my sweet tooth." Xzar's disturbing smile was another quality she liked about the pair. He had one gap between his teeth, and slightly inclined his head to the right like a woodlands animal. One with claws; but one whose tangled, light brown hair Prudence felt occasional temptation to ruffle. Or approach with a steel-toothed comb and significant patience.

"Let's sharpen your sweet tooth on mead." That was not as witty as she wanted it to be. "We must equip ourselves and rest before entering the mines. Montaron, do you need extra bullets or crossbow bolts? It may be effective to attack from long distance."

"Let us not be honourless," Jaheira remarked dourly. "But for strategy against demons, you've a fair point. I shall prepare Entanglements several. Though I doubt residents of the Nine Hells have truly invaded this place."

Xzar released a high-pitched giggle. "Demons who feed on iron and flesh. I have seen demons with eyes like cheesecloth. 'Tis true..."

It was at that point an (another) assassin decided earning her bread on their corpses would be profitable. For a while the inn was a bloody place. The victim of a Hold Person to bind her in place— (reading about it, so quietly in Candlekeep, _An Account of Offensive Clerical Casting By The Sage Thanatos_ , a musty brown cover and small calligraphic text, was all too different to the experience—), Prudence was grateful to feel the spell wear off in time to avoid a deadly blow, while Jaheira's staff slammed down upon the back of the woman's head. The attacker was dead, her skull caved into a misshapen, inhuman lump; Prudence could not say that she had become accustomed.

 _First that—that disadvantaged and impoverished person in the priest's hut with a knife, and the one in the bunkhouse—then the wizard on the steps of the Friendly Arm with the bounty— and now—_

Prudence could take a hint, particularly when it was emblazoned upon enormous banners in gold and scarlet. She beat Montaron to stooping to rummage the fallen enemy's pockets, and stood up from the corpse with another scroll hidden in her armour.

"Any good loot?" Montaron watched her with narrowed eyes. She handed him the gold.

"We should rest," she said. She ought to sleep; let oblivion drive it all temporarily from her mind. Her focus would be required for the mines; would she fail and run a second time?

"Clean 'er boots, and hand 'em to me in the morning," Montaron ordered the disgusted-looking inkeeper, pointing down at the corpse's feet.

"How repulsive!" Jaheria snapped. "You befoul yourself with greed. 'Tis unnatural." She gave Prudence a meaningful stare, presumably expecting the paladin to join in the moral condemnation.

"Mines, ye fool of a wench," Montaron said. "Even halfling feet do not rejoice treading metal—and curse ye if you think my toil deserves no reward!"

 _That was, in fact...a pragmatic and reasonable argument._

"You should at least clean them yourself," Prudence said. She gave Jaheira an apologetic look. "I think Montaron has a point. I'll lay her to rest in slippers."

"G-good lass," said Khalid. "I-if you need help..." he offered, showing clear reluctance for the grisly task; Prudence shook her head. It must be my responsibility in any case. Mine also, to protect these companions from such things as pursue me.

"Gravedigging? Let me be the volunteer, do let me, teacher!"

Prudence used her strength to lift the spade in the barren corner of the town graveyard allotted her; Xzar, whose enthusiasm had evaporated with the warmth of the day, only watched silently, leaning against a crumbling wall as she cracked open the hard ground. The assassin's limbs had already begun to stiffen; Prudence tried not to shiver as she reached into the grave to arrange her properly. She had only witnessed a few funerals at Candlekeep, mostly aged monks who had passed to a natural rest; if she remembered correctly, the left arm ought to touch the shoulder and the right resting over it, hand paused above the heart.

"You're doing it wrong," Xzar commented. "That's _Oghma's_ funeral rites."

 _Oh_. Most in Candlekeep worshipped Oghma; she hadn't given the matter a thought. Surely the god of learning wouldn't be the god of an assassin. Admittedly she had also been an assassin of clerical persuasion. "Well? What deity should I use?"

"Now that is a difficult question." He bent down next to Prudence, arranging and rearranging the corpse's limbs with considerable dexterity. "Garagos, each hand raised to the chest and clutching a weapon, we can always just break this stick in two to use. Leira, the sign of questioning in the left hand and eyes open. Shar, I've a vague impression it's open palms crossed. But you really have no respect for corpses, do you, paladin?"

Ah—she had responded to his necromantic boasts that casting spells with corpses hardly harmed sapient beings, however repulsive it might be. "As a philosophical point, no, like I said. But it matters to living people—" burying Gorion with Imoen beside her, what would they not have done if someone had attempted to violate her father's unliving form? Thinking of Gorion made her lose the tangent. "And you know very well I have to do what other people would like! So how do we figure what god it is?"

"It's simple, really," Xzar said. He scribbled words on a scroll in ink black as his intricate tattoos, in runes Prudence knew barely the sounds of, not at all the meanings. "Say these words as a paladin, and no doubt at least one of your gods will hear you—and I shall perform the ritual forgiven by deities. Not that I believe in them, it only encourages them." He reached into a pouch he had concealed, and sprinkled herbs of an uncertain nature over the body. "'Tis no advanced spell, only a call to the gods in more-than-final extremity. Of course, how do you know that it does not express a sacred vow to turn Blackguard?"

Prudence sighed. Candlekeep tutors had made some efforts in educating her. "Impia iam merita scrute—scrutatus lumina dextra—merserat aeterna damnatum nocte pudorem; oedipodes longag—longaque animam sub morte traje—trahebat." _Well, if I were a god, I'd judge intent... Let's hope I pronounced everything right, I have no idea how to even spell those runes out properly._

Xzar had a tinderbox; a spark flared, and fire consumed the body, such that Prudence saw a skull smiling up at her as she jumped back from the heat.

"Now her evil and/or neutral deity shall claim her soul," Xzar said. "Too bad I didn't think to save the liver. It goes so divinely with Elminster's mead." Turning abruptly, he whistled his way back to the inn; "Thank...", Prudence began, but he would not answer her. She picked up the shovel to push back the dug earth over the ashes that remained.

"You know, you could've explained your ritual _before_ I dug all the way down!" she called after him.

—

They had met in the forest, on the road to the Friendly Arm—a tumultuous meeting, Prudence and Imoen pursued by wolves that Montaron helped them fight off after the breathless agreement Imoen had negotiated.

"We travel to Nashkel, and would not be averse to companions on the road. Perhaps Monty here will prove our sincerity...Monty, will you help the young ladies with those dreadful creatures?"

"Oh, I'll do yer toil, wizard," Prudence had heard Montaron grunt. She, lunging at the pair of wolves in front of her, scored a deep slash down the side of the closer beast; the other warrior joined her to flank them. With Imoen's arrows, the deed was soon done.

"Thank you," Prudence said. The fighter—a cut on his left hand, though not deep enough to need to lay hands upon—wore leather armour over grubby clothing, and had the curly hair and stature of a halfing; looking reluctant to clean the gore from his sword, he bent down to pluck a handful of grass. She did the same. "Uh, my name is Prudence. Where did you say you were going...?"

"Fools! The hands of fighters are best left from intellectual discussions." She had not properly noticed the halfling's companion before, a figure in tattered green robes; Prudence stared at him. He seemed a little older than she and Imoen, a slim man laughing with a strange tone to his voice; green-eyed, and more fey than several elves she had met within the library walls. "Know the name of Xzar, dullard. Necromancer...powerful."

"Pleased to meet you," she said tartly. Funny; she found it easy to accept the insults as casual byplay. _Prove your intelligence, Prudence!_ "I don't know much about necromancing, but I did think Kilraanus's Death and Divine Casting was quite interesting." (Not that she had actually read more than the first two chapters in the library, as cleric magic was as yet far beyond her and the latter chapters went deep into technical complexities, but she could truthfully say that she aspired to it.) _Paladins are allowed to impress new companions, right?_ Even if they were necromancers...which was still a perfectly legitimate specialization to choose in order to optimize one's selection of spells.

"Ah. I notice Candlekeep is to the west." That seemed a better response from him. "Perhaps we shall discuss our terms of alliance further—after a brief respite." They had reached a junction between two roads, a sign indicating the Friendly Inn to the north; relatively safe.

"I'm feeling a little peckish myself," Imoen said. "Hey, Pru, didya pack anything edible?"

That was completely Imoen. Boldly sneaking out of the walls of Candlekeep to follow Prudence's escape, bringing the bow and arrows that had already saved their lives—and forgetting any provisions. Though, to be honest, Prudence had had the advantage of warning for the journey.

"Like the mad wizard said, we're headed to the Nashkel Mines," Montaron explained to Prudence. "Our—client—desires a reason behind the iron shortage."

"We're going to the Friendly Arm to meet friends," Prudence said. "If you don't mind a detour, we'll be pleased to accompany you. Perhaps our friends will also." _A quest to halt the iron shortage. Without Gorion_ —she pushed that thought to the back of her mind, for later— _I do not know what to do. Perhaps, in examining the problems on the Sword Coast, I will find enough direction to at least avoid thinking about..._

"Hmm. The delay is unfortunate, but with the roads as they are—I will accept such terms," Xzar said. "Take these healing potions in return. Excellent bread, by the way. Fresher than dear Monty's tastes."

From Candlekeep kitchens. That thought was also unwelcome.

"Monty," Imoen said, looking down at the halfling next to her. "Say, you're pretty good with that blade." Imoen also favoured a short sword, if deprived of her preferred bow; and, though the halfling's fighting style seemed stronger and more fluid than Imoen's, Prudence could see similarity in the techniques they favoured, much more reliance to speed and craft than simple strength.

"The name is Montaron. And I will slit yer throat at anything otherwise." Imoen looked shocked; and rallied.

"You jest well—" She punched his arm, quite hard; he reached up to rub it, scowling wickedly. Prudence looked for the swift movement of her other hand. "No, I take you seriously, Montaron. Slit my throat if you will, but look to your coin!"

Montaron reached to his belt, but too late; Imoen waved his filched purse at him.

"Thieving talent?" He belched. "Lass, you we'll show a profitable target or two. Now return my goods, lest I carry out my threat."

"Tell us more," Xzar said dreamily, his long fingers splayed on the grass; the light turned them almost translucent. "Two adrift in the forest, hailing from Candlekeep."

"We were travelling with my father," Prudence said. Actually, Imoen had been sneaking behind, but that was too much detail for comparative strangers. "He was murdered on the road by—they were bandits, I guess." The figure in dark armour had not spoken like a bandit, but that was another thing that she did not need to say. It was only last night. Only last night that she had run from the fight, betraying everything a paladin was supposed to hold dear. Just now they had found Gorion's body, and his letter... "Now we go to meet his friends, in—in his place."

Xzar ignored her. "Have you ever seen dragons with feet like rabbits?" he asked dreamily. Plucking a stick from beside him, Xzar sketched patterns on the ground. Prudence allowed herself to relax a little. If they inquired further into her story, she did not know how she would restrain herself from weeping again at Gorion's death. She tried to smile at the sunlight through the trees above them, dappling the wizard's strange drawings in gold.

"Shade 'tis cool, and sound; must be quiet; oh, how the appendix squishes, with mead and sweet beans. Monty in the shadows is so useful ; the scales went before it could look in silver! I allowed it to do so. Never lose yourself into two reflections. Rabbits, too quick, wolves, too slow; drain them all with a cantrip. Mummy would never not heal me. Do you know what happens, basilisk's blood with smoking ice in dreadwolf liver?—isn't it funny! The scaled thing had no hoard though, how terrible! Monty simply lives for gold; for my delicate needs, let me throw such incessant noise...I see you would rather listen than tell a story. I shall demand a return, and stew someone's smaller intestine at that. Allow me to sketch the rabbit in the moon; he smiles at Montaron."

The wizard was not sane; within his ramblings, though, might have been flashes of insight, and hints of stories past. In idly piecing the tangled scraps together there was welcome occupation of the mind. Xzar and Montaron were no scholars of Candlekeep, and Prudence was grateful.

The halfling finished a dirty-minded joke about lockpicking; Imoen laughed. "Yeah, that's not exactly why I became a thief," she said.

"Ho there, wanderer." Prudence looked up. Her hand immediately dove to her crossbow; how had she failed to observe the approach of another? The traveller was white-bearded, though; perhaps he intended them no harm. "Would thou stay the course a moment, to indulge an old man?"

"Certainly." Prudence stood, a little awkwardly; she gestured down to what remained of the bread and cheese laid out on her kerchief. "If you would share with us, you're welc..."

"There is no need for that, youngster. Do you travel to the Friendly Arm Inn?"

Prudence's gaze darted to the sign near them. "Perhaps rest there, briefly," she said. "I have heard it is famed in all the region." Was their course really so easy to guess? Perhaps she ought to consult Imoen as to stealth; she did not wish to leave a beacon advertising their destination to all who might wish them harm.

"Why take an interest, old man?" Montaron said. "Ye never know who ye might be talking to, times as they are." Prudence was not sure if the way he fingered his sword's hilt was intentionally ominous or not.

"I agree. One should sometimes be wary of companions." Did the old man's gaze sweep the necromancer and the halfling, deliberately? She was not sure. "But that is enough of an old man's ramblings. Fare thee well."

"Let's be off." Montaron yanked what was left of their meal away, packing quickly. "I'll not be gawked at by all travellers who please!"

"Monty, you have such a temper! Tell me about the rabbits. And the one with the gold and the bears!"

—

The band of hobgoblins came upon them. Prudence drew her scimitar, dashing forward; she heard Imoen nock an arrow behind her. The first she disarmed in one of Rolland's maneuvers, and followed with a straight thrust to its chest; the second, third, fourth, and fifth presented rather greater difficulty. She found herself matching a blade with No. Three, Montaron beside her trying to hack at another's kneecaps. She tried to use her shield defensively, protecting them both.

A shot from Imoen distracted one from her, and Xzar cried a single word. A spell, it was, white-coloured, possibly energy-stealing (... _necromancy_...); another arrow from Imoen buried itself in the orange flesh. Prudence kept fighting. Montaron's hobgoblin had started to bleed— She grunted when a blow bruised her sword arm. Thank Helm for solid chainmail. Xzar's unearthly laugh sounded as his second spell killed the target. Two dead.

"Mummy, help, no more spells!"

Broken loose. One of the hobgoblins she'd been trying to fight, racing to Im and the wizard. Prudence saw him ducking behind Imoen, hiding his face in his arms; she ran to protect them. Her sister, and a frail mage, chased by a large hobgoblin—Montaron would hold back the other two; she was going to trust him at her back. She flung herself on the hobgoblin, making him turn from the chase.

 _Protect Imoen._

Hvaltha would have approved of the strength she found to strike. ( _Attacking it from behind—a paladin? But it was chasing the vulnerable in my group—_ ) The killing. It was over rather quickly. There was almost surprise on the hobgoblin's face when it turned back to try to fight, but she withdrew her scimitar and stabbed it again, when it died. She'd killed perhaps four humanoids ever. No time to think on that; Montaron fought still, finishing one off at that very moment. One remaining. She used her shield to block its shortsword, and the halfling hamstrung it; and presently it also died.

She lowered her scimitar, rested lightly on her shield, and posed as though she had known for the whole time what she was doing. ( _On second thoughts: honesty is the best policy_.) It had been nothing like driving away a few gibberlings alongside the Candlekeep Watchers. Montaron was already bent to the corpses, and rifled quickly through the first hobgoblin's leathers.

"Thank you," she said to him. For fighting; taking the brunt of it when she'd rushed away.

He ignored her. "Bloody hobbos never carry anything worth me time." A few coins passed through his fingers from the hobgoblin's pouch. "Ye brats feel like pulling yer weight at the looting? Mind that I'll be slitting throats if I'm cheated."

"I don't cheat," Prudence said.

"Except at solitaire," Imoen said, which didn't count. "Prudence the Mighty Paladin! You have rescued the Princess Imoen from the vile band of vile hobgoblins!" she laughed. "Not to say that Imoen the Immensely Crafty Rogue wasn't a fantastic shot with her bow as well—"

Montaron had stopped dead in his tracks; Prudence saw dust kicked up when he turned from the hobgoblin he plundered. He shouted:

"Ye what! Ye mean we've been trusting ourselves with a bloody paladin? " Scuttling several steps away from Prudence, he stared at her as if she had suddenly polymorphed into a venomous snake. "Wizard, hark at this! A feckin' paladin, and she keeps quiet as a mouse and lets us imagine she's just another fighter!"

Prudence gaped at him. "A paladin who you weren't too proud to fight hobgoblins with five minutes ago!"

"A deceptive jade indeed," Xzar agreed, stroking his chin. "Oh, evasions, half-truths, lies-of-omission don't count—was that where you were about to split hairs, my dear?" It had been, and furthermore she would have been right, and still further he wasn't nearly old enough to use the patronising adjective, Prudence noted. "Well, Monty, I don't think you ought to stab her in the back, since she's forewarned of course—"

"Well, I wonder what kind of people don't like paladins," Imoen said, posing really quite formidably with a hand on her waist. "Sis?"

"What makes you so concerned?" Prudence said to Xzar.

"Oh, I've only cast spells from dead people Monty made that way—indulged in frighteningly devious necromantic rites to imprison the soul in numerous simultaneous sequential hells—turned unliving flesh into abominations that would drive you mad mad MAD—and I did mention dead spell components, didn't I?—and rabbits, I've cast spells with rabbits too, and chatted to Netherese liches and turned peaceful innocent little villagers into zombie horrors who eat their own flesh oh yes and and and—all of which you ought to know, Prudence of the unfortunate name, with your white staring eyes looking into the soul just as bad as teeth gems glowing orangelemarine in the dark—"

"Montaron, is he really that powerful a wizard?" Prudence said. Screaming and hiding behind Imoen had failed to give her an impression of a wizard she ought to fight; she'd had to protect him. If they wished to do harm, they would have done so already. Comfort after Gorion's death...

"I'd say that it's more the blasted human whippersnapper's inevitable death I be watching fer," Montaron said. "Ye aren't inclined to hurry yer own somewhat? We've duties to be getting to."

"You gave us healing potions; we fought together; the mines sound like a good thing to do. I don't know how many other paladins you've met or what—"

Xzar burst into high-pitched laughter. "Exactly none, of course! Until you enter, pursued by wolves—"

"Because we're not stupid. While ye may not know it, the tinheads don't have a sterling reputation in all parts," Montaron snarled. "Going to do the thing with the eyes, Primrose?"

That was certainly a fighting word; Imoen had thoroughly exploited the existence of the children's scroll series involving Clover the Cleric, Primrose the Paladin, Daisy the Druid, and their little friend Winslow the Wizard.

"Not if I don't have to. Privacy, preconceptions, occasional unreliability, and makes my head hurt." She had reasoned it out in detail and believed, quite strongly, that she'd no right to glare inside another's psyche without due reason; even Rolland, who had told her either to polish his ceremonial armour yet again or run laps of the keep whenever she began theoretical tangents, had said gruffly that to overuse the gods' gifts was improper (and had then told her to fetch the polish).

Xzar nodded almost sympathetically. "Sometimes my head hurts too! Then the voices in my head start talking and the trees start moving around. Smiles everyone, smiles! This is like some great fantasy!"

He seemed to...dance.

"I don't know whether to laugh or be really, _really_ disturbed," Imoen said.

"Now you've gone and set him off! Blasted mage will blither for hours!" Montaron scowled, and jerked a dirty thumb in Xzar's direction. "Give me a hand. Your conscience for our healing potions be your guide. Just like all good people."

Four in the wilderness. Montaron's practicality was helpful; he had Xzar sitting propped against a tree easily enough. She noted a bloodstain on his leathers the wrong tint to be hobgoblin.

"Would you like me to lay hands on you?" she offered to him. He gave a comment in return—a very inventive one, really, but a moment's thought placed it comfortably into the fifth category of possible inappropriate innuendo.

"Yes, one has to know a lot about anatomy to heal," Prudence said, which had the benefit of being entirely true; she heard Imoen snort.

A hobgoblin's blade had slid across Montaron's off arm, slashing through his light armour and cutting through the skin. She concentrated; she'd learned from Candlekeep's clerics of Oghma how the bones and muscles knit together, the melding of blood vessels and the Old Chessentan names of each of the major ones, how to bind the cut and stretch the skin together again. Prayers of healing could harm out of sheer ignorance if they were not coupled with knowledge, requiring a cleric of greater ability to inflict again and properly heal the wound. Montaron's scratches were no worse than the standard Candlekeep injury—training accidents to herself, Imoen dropping a too-heavy wine case on Winthrop's foot by accident, Dreppin falling off a stable ladder, occasional bites from rare gibberling raids—and she knew she had succeeded in fully restoring him. The bruises beneath her armour were only beginning to ache, and she promised herself she could use any healing power that remained to her upon them at the very end of the day.

"I see the Brow star rising," Xzar said; he had stood up, regathered his robes about him to some degree of order, and pointed at the sky. The faint light of the northernmost star of Mystra's Circle had started to spark against the dark blue. "What distance from the Inn, chums?"

"Five hours, I'd give with ye walking it," Montaron said.

"Then we're stopping, right?" Imoen said. "Don't get me wrong, I love the dark."

"Ye'll walk 'till we're out of hobbo territory."

There didn't seem to be room for disagreement there; "He's right," Prudence said. She carefully reshouldered her pack; she was tired, but it would do no good to show it.

"Amour chafe issues?" Xzar said. "I tire easily enough myself..."

"I'm fine." She liked to think she had enough willpower—and thankfulness toward divine grace—to last through anything that had to be done. Nevertheless she knew her own weaknesses.

"I've started to think you're secretly in league with some rabbits or other," he said. "That makes you not very boring."

"Imoen's foster father sometimes made a very good rabbit stew if there were only a few of us," Prudence said. Perhaps mentioning the consumption would bring him closer to reality?

"...And wouldn't understand a subtle concept if it attacked you naked except for an 'I Am Smitable Oh And A Subtle Concept' flag on its head."

"Dialogue does not need to be packed with insults to be...not boring," Prudence said.

"Perfect concordance and charmingly tedious repose are two phrases of the same meaning."

"And that's falsely broadening my point," she said.

"I'm so flattered you noticed. How much debate do your holy orders generally allow?"

"It depends on the order, of course," she said. "I think that words alone do no harm, but there are restrictions upon subjects..." Such as that book the Order of the Radiant Heart had deposited in Candlekeep; ten-year-old Imoen had gleefully told her about all the drawings of strange naked people in it and how Winthrop kept it in his room. But not all good deities disapproved of such things in the least.

He laughed; a sudden, quick noise, rather than long and disturbing as before. "Words do no harm! Spells are words and charms are words and bonds are words; words are bridges and journeys and founding springs to the world; words are communions and belief and change; and when they are so powerful you pay them no heed?"

" _Harmless_ , not no heed," she corrected. "It isn't right to judge others on their words without reference to their actions. What about the case where a person speaks incautiously and does actions that are good? Insincere words might—"

"Insincere words are lies! But you were right, evasions and not-saying aren't lies. I think that's an important point. Of course these matters are hurtful and destructive. Not only the falsehood. A few words of perfect truth too mad to seem true in the great halls of the powerful and they all fall down...or pack you safely away elsewhere, that sort of thing. Not harmless—" he said.

"All right, not harmless, I'll give you that," she broke in. "But trying to murder someone just because they said something would be a lot more harm." She realized a gap she had left, and hurried to close it. "Unless it was a case where a lie directly led to an evil act or injustice, such as framing someone for a deed they didn't do. And that would be an exception," she finished.

He smiled. "You've changed your argument from harmless to _It would definitely cause more harm to murder people who say things I don't like_. Which is all very productive and I'm sure saves you the time and trouble of committing a few genocides here and there, but still your logic-shifting word-shifting ways—"

"Ways which in no way are akin to yours—no, that's equivocation. Opinions, while unattached to either magic or deeds, are a matter for each individual and should only be acted against if they become attached to such things and then harm others," she said.

"The shackled, rule-bound approach. How is continuity favoured by your theories? Take one word, all it has ever meant to everyone speaking it, the lack of one single moment when that boundary shall pass and that one word transforms to significance, and your result—"

"We're not supposed to fight until the circumstances require it. So we choose a particular moment, err on the side of caution, and use that arbitrary moment to help in judgement. Humans have to do that to make sense of the world." That felt slightly too simplified, but true nonetheless by practice.

"Are you really completely sure about that? The world is a glittering haze and the other name for it is Change and if you can hold more than seven continuous dimensions in your head without being driven mad you've done far better than I. Draw a line upon this." He muttered a few words; a sphere of light green mage-light sprung up about his head. Prudence hadn't realized how dark the evening had become. The small light illuminated his face; a spark of it shone brightly in his eyes.

Debate; cantrip; and—

"Here's a decent enough camping spot," Montaron informed them; his pack hit the ground with a dull thump. "Cease the blather, douse the light in case of unwelcome guests coming to slip a blade in you first, and get to work."

"Thank goodness!" Imoen said cheerily. "Y'know, she talks and _talks_ at you, it's supposed to be a paladin-charisma-diplomacy-thing but..." Which was clearly somewhat stretching the truth.

"At least she's saner than the mad mage," Montaron said. "You're a decent cook, girl? Supplies're in that pack."

"We'll need a fire, won't we?" Imoen said helpfully.

Xzar had slumped down against a tree. "Yes, I must study; make light and warmth for me."

"Go do something—carry sticks or help with the tents," Prudence said. She detached the hatchet she had brought from Candlekeep. "I'll go into the woods." And finally take off the armour; she'd sweated terribly.

"Thy voice is ambrosia," Xzar said. "Or possibly two parts ambrosia, one part honey, three tumeric, one saffron, one basil... Which would be quite indigestible." Either way, he stood again.

"Yer still not getting anywhere near the stew. His spell components get into it," Montaron explained in an aside.

"Oh, pish, a single instance of a few gibberling fingerbones. Plebeian narrowmindedness at its worst," he said. "Still, I may be able to do something. If I must! Tell me more 'bout the rabbits!"

Prudence felt it was a relief to be walking without her chain hauberk; the night was dark, but the moon sufficient light to find kindling. Distant howls and noises sounded, and she remained as quiet as possible.

"About time," Montaron grunted; the pair of small tents both stood together. Xzar was nowhere to be seen.

"We got rid of him; he's asleep," Imoen said. "C'mon, start up the fire."

It was Imoen's dice they rolled for watch allocations, which wasn't entirely unproblematic; she took on first watch. Prudence fed the warm ashes about the pot containing what was left of Imoen's stew, for Xzar, when he'd take the watch before dawn. ( _Sure, the crazy wizard ain't to be trusted for much, but he'll scream like a little girl if anything happens_. Chauvinistic in the mode of expression, but believable.)

Prudence took up the weight of her scimitar and began the exercises. It would be much easier to collapse like Xzar; no amount of healing prayers could take the ache from her bones, the way her weaponry felt as if it were made of dense lead. Yet if she could not do this, she would fail the next time a battle came to them. If she continued to try, broke past the exhaustion and into a second strength, she could outlast her own limits. Thanks to the gods' grace.

She ran the regular meditations, prayers, through her mind.

 _My father is dead._

Feint in quart.

 _I pray for aid in investigating this mine in Nashkel, doing what I can to help in this matter—_

Hooking thrust in tierce. Gorion would wish her to follow in his footsteps as an adventurer; to grieve him in her heart rather than in place of achieving what he would approve of.

 _In defending my companions._

Block in seconde. The force of this was filling her mind, as it ought. _Concentration._

 _I pray to be granted healing again this night._

Low slash from tierce. She could have stayed with Gorion, healed him—through her vocation she cast the spell faster than most Candlekeep clerics—and—

 _I pray for the strength to continue on._

Block in tierce. Dangerously ragged and uneven; her hand shook slightly.

 _Strength—_

High slash from seconde.

 _To save other people._

—

There was nothing when she'd woken Imoen that ought to have suggested gibberlings in the air; and she had managed to sleep without dream almost from the instant she had closed her eyes. But Xzar happened to be screaming and surrounded by gibberlings at some point just before dawn.

Montaron was fast, swearing loudly, already scattering them with his short sword. Prudence gathered up her weapon belt, took hold of her shield— _ought to know exactly where they were, ought to always know_ , ran through her mind—and joined the fight.

The gibberlings had branched into two groups—not counting a third consisting of a few running back off into the woods, they were two half-circles surrounding Xzar. Montaron methodically sliced at those to the right. Xzar was shouting, his arms windmilling and his dagger making wild swings at the creatures. She attacked at the left, charging to herd them away from Xzar—gibberlings were quick to fear—

He dropped to the ground, a gibberling on top of him. His spellbook floated above his head, bizarrely enough, bobbing and dipping as if sharing his distress. Prudence slashed her way forward, knocked the gibberling away from him. He was bleeding through his mage's robe, more than she'd seen anyone do from a gibberling—it _was_ only gibberlings. She protected him.

A set of small teeth nipped around her bare wrist, clinging there; she shook her arm fiercely. It dropped and fell, and she cut through it. The creatures were starting to scatter. She cast her healing quickly on Xzar, stemming the deep wound, shielding with her other hand. Montaron finished the last of them.

"Cutthroats everywhere I'll not let them take us alive!" Xzar rolled aside. The spellbook still rotated around his head. "I feel better now."

"And the rivers run red! Piddling little streams." Montaron kicked a gibberling's body. "I'd rather miss my beauty sleep for better prey."

"Ewww." Imoen, recently crawled out of the tent, wrapped her arms tightly around her pink chemise. She stared at the blood and bodies of the creatures. "That's revolting. Is this supposed to happen every night?"

"Nope. What did they get away with, wizard?" Montaron kicked his way between the bodies.

"Looks like the food, and some of the pots," Imoen said.

"The iron," Montaron said. "A pox on them! Raid the bodies for what payment ye find."

"Yep: ewww. I'll be back there getting properly dressed," Imoen said.

"Squeamish, are we?" Montaron said to Prudence. A few gibberlings had rough pouches strapped to their bodies. The bite on her wrist ached dully, and she used as little of her reserves as possible against it in case of infection. "Would ye rather benefit the next travellers, or save us time and trouble?"

She unstrapped a pouch from a gibberling leg stained in light blue blood. Two human-made gold pieces; a small stained silver ring. The gibberlings hadn't carried much. It would be hypocritical, Prudence thought, to run away from the corpses when she had helped to create them.

"Five gold, two silver, three coppers; two rings," she counted. "What about you?"

"Their spleens make terrible spell components and emergency rations," Xzar said.

"Eight gold and a bloodstone amulet," Montaron said. "Not so concerned for yer modesty as the sister?"

The top lacing of her undershirt was flapping loose; she pulled it back together. "There are more important things."

"Heh. Off to yer goody-goody friends, then."

—

She could see it at last, once they emerged from a particularly dense thicket after their hours of walking: the Friendly Arm. The sun had not reached the centre of the sky, shining on the huge edifice of solid stone. It looked like a castle; hadn't it once been something of the sort? In any case, its fortifications promised a temporary respite, company, Gorion's friends.

"Gosh," Imoen said. "Have you been before? Montaron? So big! Lots of rich people staying there?"

"Rules are strict on thieving," Montaron said, though he seemed to smirk. "No getting caught."

"...and the ordinary people of the Inn have their rights and properties, Im..." Prudence said. Her sister had always (almost) returned the sundry inkwells and quills she'd swiped from the monks.

"Practicing is so important for adventurers, and I guess I can learn a lot!" Imoen gave a dimpled, innocent smile.

It did not take too long a time to reach the gates, encouraged by the sight at last. Even close up, it was a magnificent structure; that dark grey stone, imposingly placed with hair-thick lines separating one vast slab from the next, the sense of history, the battles and the blood shed here— Where had that piece of melodramatic imagining come from? Prudence smiled at the pleasant-looking guard, a tall man with bright blue eyes, and he told of the common-sense rules of the Inn. Armour surrendered; weapons surrendered; and Xzar elaborately hooked his left thumb into his belt.

They walked past the small farms within the Inn's grounds; like Candlekeep, the cows and narrow fields it kept were necessary to sustain the small world within its borders. The guard had mentioned the temple of Garl Glittergold, a small but elaborately decorated building topped with the god's symbol. The Inn should have been a content place, but in the fragments of conversations carried on the wind, the words 'bandits' and 'iron' were never far distant. It was clear that Something would have to be done about the iron crisis, and once they met Gorion's friends and left here she would help, Prudence vowed.

On the narrow steps to the Inn stood a man; he was almost as skinny as Xzar, with cramped, narrow features. The wizard robes he wore looked as though they had been slept in. Prudence saw him looking at them; and at her. She raised a hand in greeting.

"Excuse me," he said to her, facing her on the steps. "Might you be Prudence of Candlekeep?"

"Yes. Are you Khalid? I'm glad to m—"

"Don't move. I have something for you," he said. He opened his hands; something cold and invisible seemed to pass by Prudence's cheek. Imoen and Xzar screamed almost in unison, and guards too shouted in what sounded like a deathly fear.

She looked back; she had to. They weren't physically harmed, but Imoen and the others were running below like grains of wheat blown by the wind, shouting about fears they felt.

A Horror spell. And when Prudence looked back to the wizard, five of him danced. Impossible to tell which was true, which casting the next spell. For weaponry she'd but the hatchet. She stepped forward, punching blindly, the weights in her gloves adding strength—trying to find the real one— Disrupting the imposed terror.

Two burning missiles hit her in the chest. She gasped for breath, frantic prayers in her mind. _Heal—please—_

A pale white spell destroyed one of the images. Prudence stumbled against the shapes, and a second image seemed to blink out. She lurched forward. The wizard was chanting again, three pairs of hands in swift motion. Her right hand found the hatchet and she lunged toward the caster with the improvised weapon. The hands seem to falter slightly, the wizard's reflections sidestepped; and a second spell consumed another image. It was Xzar's casting. The final image seemed to flicker out as she swung at it; she breathed in a thick gulp of air and felt the power of the gods she called upon. One wizard remained, waving his hands still. Something—someone—half her height rushed by, moving too swiftly and silently to be more than the lightest consciousness.

She attacked again, but the wizard crumpled and fell on the steps independent of her act. Montaron, behind him, held a shortsword that he must have somehow concealed, overflowing with gore. She leaned back against the wall, touching where the spell had wounded her. Even her armour would have done nothing to stop it from burning.

Imoen was still screaming, something about pink werewolves chasing her; the Friendly Arm guards also cried for help. Xzar was near the steps, brushing dust from his hands.

"Can you dispel it?" she asked him.

" _Montaron, is he really that powerful a wizard_?" he recited, not unbitterly. "No, can you?" The gods had not revealed to her the ability to shape prayers in such a way.

"It will wear off soon anyway, won't it?" she said. "—Weren't you hit by it? You screamed—"

"Everyone else was. I thought I'd follow the fashion." He smiled, and the unfocused look seemed to find its way to his eyes again. "I've never liked the sunlight; 'tis just too bright. And the trees are moving again. Why don't you come smite them for me? I think—"

There were two figures standing on the top of the steps, speaking; Prudence heard a woman's voice.

"'Tis almost a slight on him, but I see it too."

"Yes, dear," her male companion said. Both of them wore leather jerkins stiff enough to be close to light armour; and the woman held a long oak staff that did not seem to be needed for purposes of support. "Excuse us, c-child, in these circumstances; but are you Prudence of Candlekeep?—"

Prudence was bloodied, slightly, standing there with the hatchet in hand; and she was thankful Montaron was still prepared for a battle.

 _Another—_

"That's what happened to the last person who asked!" She gestured with the hatchet to the wizard's body as fiercely as she could. _I am a ruthless bloodthirsty person who will kill you!_ she tried to project. There was someone else trying to attack, and _No, you must be looking for a different tall dark human fighting woman_ might not have been convincing to avoid a fight— "Flee or face the consequences!" Her voice sounded close enough to Hvaltha's most authoritative moods, and something behind her eyes felt as hot as if she really would be able to tear their throats open—

They looked at each other. "Don't be absurd, child," the woman said. "We are your father's friends. My name is Jaheira," she said very slowly, which served to deflate Prudence's pose; "and this is my husband Khalid. Gorion is not with you? I must assume the worst. He would not permit his only child to travel without his accompaniment." She looked down at Montaron and his bloodied sword, drawing her lips narrowly together.

"Yes," Prudence said. Gorion was dead; she wished with all her heart that she did not have to continue to say the words of it. "My sister Imoen—you've heard of her?—is down there; and our companions Montaron, here, and Xzar saved us from wolves, and lately this...person."

"Nice bluff there. Didn't think ye had it in you," Montaron said to her.

"Montaron, I presume," Jaheira said; her tone was not overly friendly. "That girl Imoen; and your other..."

The wizard wasn't waiting at the steps any more; he'd wandered off somewhere. "Xzar!" Prudence called. He'd been bending over some of the foliage growing around the inn, and straightened up with a bunch of greenery in his hands. "We've found my father's friends! What are you doing?"

"Whiling away the exchanges of monotonous social untruths and picking daisies. Wheeeeee." He brought the fresh leaves he carried to his face; Prudence couldn't see any flowers among them.

"Those are poison ivy," Jaheira said.

—

 _It only encourages them_ —Pratchett's Nanny Ogg.

—


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** Quotes from real writers are plagiarised fro—I mean, borrowed with modification by characters; the game's description of weaponry is used; Mai Bhago is the name of a Sikh heroine borrowed for a brief mention; Ibn Jumay is also a real name borrowed.

"There is no excuse for ignorance of Nature. You brought this upon yourself, wizard, and it will not harm you to endure the consequences for a day," Jaheira said. Montaron hadn't provided much help in persuading Xzar to put down the ivy; and the wizard's face and hands demonstrated it.

The bustle of the Friendly Arm Inn cheered Prudence less than it would have done under normal circumstances. Explaining the bloodied human mass on the steps to the guards, defending themselves against the Inn's codes, worrying if it would happen again—fell short of optimistic imagination of exploring the wider world beyond Candlekeep, of meeting the illusionist gnome adventurer or hearing more of the tale of the barkskin-casting wizard of Baldur's Gate.

"I think you should try to heal him," Prudence repeated. 'Tis almost a slight on Gorion, but I see it too. She had been in the wrong to threaten them; but...

"'Tis not so simple as that, child," Jaheira said. "Prayers must be meditated upon in advance; specified remedies sought—"

"It's not that I don't know that—" She'd lived next to a temple of Oghma; druidic castings were similar in principle, despite the sometimes great differences in domain and philosophy. "Xzar, you'll hurt yourself if you keep doing that. If you give me your hand, I'll try." Choosing a wizard's hands to heal was pragmatic; it temporarily stopped him scratching at his face, too. She felt perhaps enough capacity for prayer left to her to make an attempt.

"—Stop touching me!" He quickly drew back, as if he had seen something to suddenly class her as a threat.

"I suppose the choice of companions should be your own." Jaheira gave a very expressive sigh, and turned in her seat to face her husband.

"Everyone d-deserves a chance, dear."

It was part pride, likely enough, that led Prudence to continue suasion. "I won't if you don't want me to, Xzar. I can heal you, if you like—I couldn't try to harm you with this if I wanted to."

That, somehow, captured his attention. Xzar leaned forward, his green eyes narrowed. "But when you reach into other people's bodies, blood still travelling or not it doesn't matter—destruction is always easier than creation. They like inflicting rather than curing, most of them. How many times have you seen the red hands coming for you?"

Inflicting wounds rather than healing; the clerical theory was all too simple, that healing powers could easily be applied to deliberately break and warp instead of mend, closer and far more intimate than a sword's attack or an arcane damage spell. And it was something she was grateful to her gods that she lacked the choice to do by intent. "I don't. I can't distort my healing."

"Fascinating. Almost as many sharp objects upon you as Monty, and yet you swear not to hurt when you touch." He sounded mocking, but she supposed he made a point, and he was allowing her—

She made the casting, seeking calmness and precision to flow through her ungloved hands. The plant's secretions bonded with tissue and forced an ill reaction; she encouraged that to mend. There was little time she could sustain the prayer, but she saw some of the angry blisters fading, the swelling eased. A film of oil was drawn to the surface of their hands, inactive.

"Slightly improved." Xzar flexed his long fingers. "That would be my spells rendered easier to cast...against the rabbits chasing your neck?"

"You'd have to go to the temple for further healing. I ought to visit it in any case," she said. She could see Imoen, safely near to Khalid, aiming a dart at a marked board on the wall, and Montaron, talking with two other halflings in the inn's darkest corner, a tankard of ale before him.

Garl Glittergold was a gnomish deity of righteousness and a sense of humour, she'd read at Candlekeep; she'd looked forward to paying her respects to his temple before the assassination attempt.

"If I must," Xzar replied.

The Friendly Arm's temple was a small stone building detached from the fortress, far more richly accoutred within than the inn's main rooms; the shrine's furnishings strongly featured gems and gold, and where it did not metallic surfaces were polished to a near-sunlike sheen. Marble shelves lying beyond were filled with near threefold the number of potions and remedies than the monks of Candlekeep had needed to store.

"Glittergold guide you on your travels." The gnomish priestess said the words of her greeting. Silver-haired and crossing her temple's elaborate tiles with a nimble step despite her stooped back, she smiled up at them, and Prudence found reassurance in the holy atmosphere of the place.

A glimmering white flash seemed to pass behind her eyes when she looked at Prudence. "I see you're another errand-fetcher to those above. I am Gellana Mirrorshade."

"A good day to you, ma'am," Prudence said. "We wished to ask if..."

"The poison ivy near the steps?" Gellana said dryly, looking up at Xzar. "Usually it's the children who get into it. I keep reminding Bentley, trim it back, tell the guards to pick up a scythe or two and put their backs into it, but I'd almost swear it's cursed. That'll be fifteen gold for a prayer, or ten gold for salve."

"Thank you. Prayer, I suppose." It would be discourteous to be stingy upon travelling companions. Prudence reached to the pouch of coin carefully strapped to her leg, her savings from Candlekeep chores and a portion of the gold they had from those who had attacked them. "We'd also like an antidote potion, and two potions of healing." She could afford little, but it was wiser to purchase items to aid them in their quest. "I should like to pay my respects to Glittergold."

"Your patronage is welcomed. Sit down, young man," she told Xzar forcefully. "You're a good deal taller than I. And you don't want to know the state of your aura."

"You might not. I care less than I care for either your god or for those shameless illusions you peddle; all the glowing jewels that pretend to hide the way death smells underneath this place—"

"Xzar!" It was a distinctly unseemly circumstance for him to lapse into ramblings. "On his behalf, I—apologise, Mistress Mirrorshade."

"Oh. Does all that matter to you?" he said in Gellana's direction. "Of course it does. I suppose that changes things?"

"It's certainly not the most tactful language we've had in here." Gellana scowled. "But we heal all sorts. Don't make me cast Silence upon you." She stepped toward him.

"There really are dead things that belonged here." He blinked slowly, leaning back languidly against one of the gold-polished stools. "You'd find them under the furnishings if you tried."

"You wouldn't, more likely," Prudence said. "The temple's walls don't match the main building; it must have been constructed after they—I'm sorry, I don't know the full story, Mistress Mirrorshade?" She'd noticed the architectural difference, and a temple would have to be new-built to be sacred to a different god.

"Took the fortress from priests of Bhaal, yes," Gellana said; a shadow seemed to cross her face. "I tore down what was here and laid some of these stones with my own two hands. It's bad for the health to brood too much over dead things," she finished pointedly.

Xzar passed a hand along his cleared chin. "Quite the injury, hmm? Delightful."

"I'd also like to make this small tithe," Prudence said. It was part of her duties; eight gold pieces, not a great sum compared to wealthier adventurers, spared in part from those she'd helped to kill.

"A welcome gift," Gellana said.

"Quixotic altruistic gestures that carefully apportion a small sum? There's no point to that," Xzar said, enthusiastic again. "If you must fling the plunder away, grant the entirety of it to the winds themselves; turn it into a grand gesture rather than the predictable mean; go to the extreme and fashion this insufferable charity to something at least interesting—"

"And you're not carrying any coin, are you?" Prudence said.

"—No; it disappears from my pockets even when I don't intend to pass it away," Xzar said. "Does that interfere with my point? It shouldn't, in purest logic."

"So I see he can be lucid at times," Gellana said dryly. "Garl's blessings and that general line whilst you continue your travels, young woman."

The temple door closed quietly behind them. Prudence sighed. She was supposed to behave with propriety within temples, and especially those of gods as much a force for good as Garl.

"I shouldn't try to take you anywhere, should I?" she said.

"Only take me to Nashkel. Accompany me, rather," Xzar said. "It was my idea first."

Nashkel; a benevolent cause. "There are—times and places for that sort of thing," she said. "Were you divining on purpose?"

"For the inexistent remains of paradoxically-dead gods of murder? Hardly. It's only that I notice when there are bones in the earth. And the people serving drinks are under some sort of illusion. But at least it's warm here. Though that can be bad for decay."

So she could imagine. "Here. You ought to keep a potion ready." The other two potions she'd give to Imoen; she herself and Jaheira could both heal, and Khalid and Montaron had armour to protect them.

Xzar carefully placed it in his belt. "Repaying my good intentions so soon? I cannot say that I don't question your own—Garl is not the only god I fail to trust. It's closer to all of them."

"Well." Telling a priestess that inside her temple had certainly not been the time and place. "Almost everyone refuses to worship at least some of the gods, unless they're in that odd branch of the AO cult. You're entitled to your opinion."

"Gods are either useless or unnecessarily interfering or want other people to hurt you no matter who you are and I'd rather be powerful enough to get rid of them all and have my studies in peace. I can't imagine you agree with that little piece of blasphemy." That seemed to be a smirk.

Bullying anyone into any kind of belief is a greater wrong than provoking inter—deliberately acrimonious debate. She'd read similar sentiments to Xzar's in Candlekeep's library.

"Of course not. I believe that the gods I choose to follow stand for justice, righteousness, and helping people—that sort of thing," Prudence said. "They aid us. But I've read books that arrived at the same conclusions without consulting the gods. Reason is enough to arrive at the same principles, no matter what you believe or don't believe, and the freethinkers I've read have been—clear-headed about it." She couldn't quite restrain an apologetic glance in the direction of the skies.

"Is there any as dangerous as a persecuting priest-ridden king; as a savage inquisitor; as a whimsical devotee, a morose bigot?" he quoted at her.

"Inquisitors aren't savage; I could have been one—" she replied. "Justice is necessary to the maintenance of every association; the distinction between good and evil does not depend upon arbitrary conventions or systems—" She added the disjointed quotes.

"I haven't read the whole of Holbach. Destruction is the mandate of the world? Gods kill magic itself in petty squabbles—"

Helm and Mystra in the Time of Troubles—and was that a partial quote from Donatien? Reading that in full would have been distinctly unsuitable for a paladin. "Helm had a duty," she said. Many scholars of Candlekeep had disapproved greatly of the act; but by the accounts of it she had read, the circumstances had granted neither he nor Mystra an alternative. "Just because the gods have conflicting responsibilities at times—and personalities—doesn't negate the good they do."

"He murdered Mystra and—actually, I could sometimes see through the chaos. Shattered glass; painstakingly place the shards in the right order and one can still reflect the gaze through them—or turn a magnifier to the ripping threads, cast through the designs of the filaments changing on the broken spinning wheel. Sometimes I wonder if even without a steward, our knowledge could still account for the secret patterns there—but I was a boy spinning cantrips then." He wove a pale green globe into the air, casting it from hand to hand in elaborate paths.

The Time of Troubles had not touched Candlekeep as strongly as other places; Prudence could remember some of her father's concerns and that of the other mages, which had made considerably more sense than these ramblings. "Wild magic, Xzar? Also, if the guards see you do that—"

He glared. "Wild? Not ever. I read and study," he said. The globe vanished. "Enough to know a little of your entities; even if my kind of knowledge triumphs. The mind is its own place—mine seems to be, in any case—and what it deduces of the intrinsic collapse of all order, structure and charity—"

"Whether or not it's folly to have faith in gods, and it's not, the works of those who lack it come to the opposite conclusion through rational means."

"Very well—I suppose it is all delightful phases of defiance, far too soonly followed by let's-pretend-we-have-to-be-nice-anyway; and in the rare rebel, it turns out to be let-us-commit-acts-of-increasingly-repetitive-depravity; never the culmination of an urge to truly expand the borders of knowledge. They all arrive at the wrong conclusions," Xzar said.

Her turn to allow a smile to show on her face. "That's a very good point you've just conceded. They converge on the point that human reason and kindness lead to—"

"Argument from authority! And you know what they say those gods did to those terribly daring theorists after they became components in the earth...or do you? Of course, I know ways of avoiding that." They'd suddenly—veered off topic.

"Nobody knows those planes," Prudence said. The wisest of clerics, in close communion with their gods, had some idea of what would await them personally; but Candlekeep's library had a mass of contradictory texts on the subject, most of which she had not read. The better path was to live life. "We don't need to talk about that sort of thing; I don't think knowing what happens after's...the right sort of knowledge for humans. The writers chose their arguments while they lived, and some of their works are still valuable to those of us who serve the gods."

"Then you set boundaries upon your knowledge after all," Xzar said. "I think I'll append to that some most sneering comment on what that says of your mind."

"There's the minor detail of comprehension, you know," she answered him. "There's only so much humans—humanoids—can understand while still remaining themselves. What happens on those planes is a matter of those planes, and in fairness—"

"And I said, I don't happen to care about it—it's a convenient knot to pick at your arguments," he said, cutting her off. "After all, where would a paladin be without painful attacks against all those who fail to match stern and arbitrary measurements?"

"Not arbitrary, as you concede the literature demonstrates. Not stern, or stern only to those who choose the discipline; and compassion besides justice."

"Compassion," he echoed; the tattoos around his mouth moved into an odd grin. "But they'll hurt you because they're bored; or they'll hurt you because they can; or for a spell component in a hurry..."

"Whoever they are—" And was it a feeling of protectiveness, for the ragged and skinny necromancer? "Not everyone's like that," she said.

He only kicked at the grass. "You're horribly wrong, and you'll find that out when you've been wandering longer, and you really don't understand how it works at all. Please don't assume you win that round, but at least you tell funny stories."

"How long have you been wandering?" she asked. It couldn't have been that long, although he was more tanned than Imoen.

"It's been a long walk. At last we're but a few days from Nashkel, if we insist on sunlight. Infravision would be nice—never mind. I'll need more coal dust and bat fur."

"Then you ought to be able to purchase that from Bentley. Perhaps a ranged weapon while you're at it?"

—

Three humans in the group, and banditry on the roads; for the sake of fewer delays, to march to Beregost while the daylight lasted.

The journey began slightly before dawn: Imoen bouncing around and flaunting her ability for permanent cheer; Jaheira and Khalid treating it as completely routine; Xzar sighing, pouting and not at all coherent; Montaron grudgingly carrying some of the wizard's supplies and making repeated mention of the vision of three damned humans and the benefits of the cover of night. The dew on the grass and the soft colours of the sunrise were gently pleasant, at first; and then the late morning descended into heavy marching under warm weather.

"There is a quest, Prudence," Jaheira told her. "A dwarven cleric from the Inn, Unshey, has alleged an ogre with a belt fetish lurking nearby, who thieved from her a valuable girdle. I think we may do her that favour if we come across his trail."

"Useless waste of time!" Montaron snarled. "How valuable, ye say?"

"Your greed is disgusting." Jaheira gave him one of those looks; which seemed to not faze Montaron in the least.

"Landrin the gnome also wanted us to clear her house of a spider infestation once we reach Beregost," Prudence said; Jaheira wasn't the only one who paid attention. "Do you know exactly where the ogre attacked?"

"She's a d-druid," Khalid said proudly. "My wife can find anything in the woods."

"I shall do so," Jaheira said; she quickened her pace to move ahead of the party, disappearing as smoothly and confidently between the trees as Imoen could hide between the shadows of the library shelves.

"—Khalid, what's that shiny elven ring you have? The one you wear on your little finger." Imoen pointed to his gloved hand, where Prudence vaguely remembered seeing a slim golden twist at the inn.

"This?" He bared his hand; the intricate styling about the tiny green chip in the centre indeed resembled the sort of thing worn by elven visitors to Candlekeep, though it was far less ostentatious than the wealth displayed by many of those who came. "It's only an old k-keepsake, Imoen. It was my mother's once."

"Yeah, that's not t' way to do it, kid," Montaron muttered, rolling his eyes in the direction of the heavens.

"How sweetly sentimental," Xzar said quietly.

"That's really nice," Imoen said. "Was she elvish?"

"Yes, my m-mother was an elf and my father a human merchant," Khalid said. "All a very long time ago, and quite far from here, of course."

"Lots of travelling and having great adventures, since then?" Imoen said.

"Well, I wouldn't call it that," Khalid said. "Jaheira and I simply—do what we can, here and there, from time to time." Prudence knew Gorion had been a Harper; she thought she had also seen a glint of a silver pin concealed by Jaheira's sleeves, but if they did not wish it publicly mentioned she would not.

"Aww, no drinking with Elminster or shaking the hands of all four Grand Dukes?" Imoen said.

"No, I'm afraid not—" Khalid said. Xzar suddenly cried out:

"Elminster! Mustn't mention him. Mustn't say the name. Using the names calls on the rabbits. Things cast on true names and true powers if he comes infernal song and attack and outrageous power no chances bad rabbits the rabbits are bad—"

"He's not here and even if he—" Prudence said. Given Elminster's achievements, speaking of him in this fashion was...ominous. "And you said the name yourself!" she added for the sake of some logic, in case it helped.

"Off on one of his spells again. Calm down, ye mad fool!" Montaron said. Xzar's hands windmilled about as if he was about to cast a spell. She'd seen him intelligent, fascinating; but when like this... Prudence echoed Montaron's suggestion to calm down, offering Xzar a hand, but he ignored her.

Khalid watched him; "You seem rather d-disturbed," he said. "Certainly you need h-help."

"Ridiculous and demeaning; no help anyone offering it is either lying or trying to sell the Boareskyr Bridge—" But it seemed Khalid's gentle tone of voice wasn't without effect.

"Elminster is no m-meddler unless 'tis needed, nor is he danger to those without ill intent...or those burdened by illness. Have you m-met him, wizard?" Khalid finished.

Xzar's voice changed again. "Why, my good half-elf. Indeed I've not knowingly so much as seen fragment of hide or hair of him ever; and I'm a wizard too." He brushed down his robes, and indeed imitated the stance of an archmage.

Imoen shook her head. "Creepy," she whispered; and took a step closer to Khalid. "...Travelled to lots of places, huh, Khalid? I've been more places than Pru myself, even if I don't remember most of 'em. Up and down the Dales, at least once or twice." Before Winthrop and Gorion had brought her to Candlekeep.

"Is that so?" Khalid looked at both girls. "B-before Gorion settled down, Prudence, I do remember that he took you to our wedding in Gulthmere, though you may have no memory of it. He carried you in a sling over his back; you were very w-well behaved."

"—No, I don't," Prudence said; it must have been long before Candlekeep.

"N-nearly—you would have been almost a year old, I belive Gorion said. Watching everything very carefully and raising your head to look about you. Of course, you're a good deal taller now..."

"Interesting," Imoen said. "Back home, we've only got those engravings with the bearskin rug—"

"Okay, Im. That's enough reminiscing—"

"You ought to be quieter in Nature's home," Jaheira said; and emerging through the trees brushed a selection of small twigs from her hair. "Anything could have heard you."

"S-sorry, dear. Only—idly remembering. We should not brood overmuch," Khalid said.

"Yeah. Ye'll make me bloody sick," Montaron said; Jaheira glared at him.

"The ogre is ahead, in any case," she announced. She looked at Prudence; "Child, what do you suggest?"

Jaheira's critical glance now firmly rested on her; Prudence could imagine it was well within her and Khalid's experience to defeat the ogre on their own. She answered the question to play to the test, taking comfort in Khalid's more sympathetic expression. "I'll walk up and politely ask the ogre to return the belts, of course," she said; Montaron cackled. She ignored him. "And then, if necessary: you wait in the trees nearby; Jaheira can cast an entanglement spell, and you can use missile weapons at a safe distance. I ought to be capable of a distraction for long enough." Her armour would protect her, and she was probably fast enough to evade for some little time.

"I would eliminate the first step," Jaheira said dryly, "but I suppose 'tis the path you have chosen in life."

"I know Gorion was p-proud of your actions," Khalid said. Encouragement indeed.

Negotiation; diplomacy; peaceful solutions first. Every creature deserves the benefit of the doubt if possible. Prudence did not try to conceal the sound of her footfalls, indeed stepping with deliberate noise; then her companions behind would be less likely heard. (If this were a tragic saga she would turn around to find nobody there—) She scolded herself against general foolish use of imagination.

It was—accounts of ogres varied usually between seven and twelve feet, and ogres themselves were no more monolithic than any other species. Eight, she would have guessed. A foul smell filled the air from it; she could see several belts draped around it, four worn as bracelets and one a necklace.

It saw her. "Puny human! Give your belt."

If she'd had a chance, she might have tried to think of some witty and ironic line: The first quest of a paladin: ending a dire case of belt banditry! But it was there and looming, carrying a large and well-spiked morningstar with ominous dark stains spread across it. Not unlike the ogres who had attacked, on that night; her throat felt suddenly dry and words leached out of her head.

Don't you dare run away again.

"Er—g—h—I've been told those belts you're wearing don't belong to you," she said suddenly, "so if that's true please return them and perhaps a settlement can be arr—"

"Too large words! Grind and eat bones then steal belt," the ogre said; and then he attacked, and it hurt. She hadn't been quite fast enough; the blow had shaken her body, and she fell on her back on the grass. But she was moving still; much-laboured-upon instinct had her roll to the side, away from the second hit to the ground beside her. She brought her shield forward; she couldn't fully counter a blow from an enemy so much stronger without shattering her shield-arm, but if she deflected at the right moment—

Arrows began to fly above her head; Jaheira's commanding voice raised the spell. It was not particularly heroic—an ogre outnumbered six to one. Perhaps it qualified as an act benefiting...all future owners of belts passing this way? She stepped back, gradually yielding as little ground as possible. It growled; she swept her scimitar through the air and actually managed to scratch its harsh skin, before she then ducked under the large morningstar it wielded. Vines wrapped securely around its feet, and her friends' aim found its way. An arrow sprouted rather horribly from the ogre's eye when it fell.

"Gotcha good!" Imoen's voice rang out. "Rescued you from the nasty ogre, Pru!"

"Thanks." Perhaps she should have tried a simpler vocabulary in her attempt at negotiation—but judging by the ogre's threats and the shade of the dried blood on its morningstar, this particular one had hurt people...

"Those two are enchanted, the rest aren't." Xzar came to stand over the corpse, pointing to the belts. "Also I want the teeth and maybe some fluids."

"A necromancer. I would wish I was surprised," Jaheira said.

"If you meant that as an insult, then please don't; and Xzar, if you only said that to annoy her, then don't do that," Prudence said.

She peeled the bracelet-belts off the ogre; the task had to be done, Montaron was right that it was better they hold the property than the next traveller (and return it to its rightful owners if they could be found). The ogre's form seemed to ripple slightly when she removed the magical pair, confirming Xzar's words. The belt worn as a necklace was difficult to detach; she used her dagger to strip away its silver buckle, feeling slightly guilty. They needed equipment.

"Completely no idea—" Xzar flung the first belt aside, one with a bright yellow buckle. He squinted at the second, quickly rotating it between his hands. "I don't have the true spell to hand, but this one I think I see a pattern. It's a sort of grey-brown-bright aura, smooth, a bit jagged in places, warm and protective—people always think warm is protective, but did you know that a frog in water that turns gradually warmer and warmer doesn't hop out and boils to death—actually, that's a lie, they do hop out—"

"An affront to Nature and cruelty to animals," Jaheira said.

"The secret purpose of the story is warning and metaphor and bedtime—and this one's solid but soft, like an iron wall covered with thick sweet syrupy stuff, small pointy things get lost and tangled as if in a labyrinth. But hard things would completely smash the pig-iron underneath. I'd use a slide-under spell or a flashy substantial area-effect if it was spells, never a quick painful spell, except it's not spells it's directed at, it's the sort of weapons that you look at with your real eyes." He shook his head fiercely; and opened his eyes fully to look at Prudence again. "I hope that all makes it very clear."

"So it's a shield against... Not subtle weapons or large weapons, but against sharp weapons?" Prudence tried to translate.

"Unshey specified a Girdle of Piercing," Jaheira said. "Three simple words, wizard."

"This one's really pretty, can I have it?" Imoen had picked up the yellow one; and she was already reaching to buckle it around herself. "Nice colour—ow! Ow ow ow!"

"Imoen! You do not touch, wear, or do anything with any unknown magical objects!" Jaheira's staff had suddenly knocked Imoen to the ground, scattering the belt away from her. "Do you know nothing, child? That belt could have a terrible curse on it!"

"You will not hit my sister." Prudence's voice sounded like a hiss to her; and from some instinct she had raised her scimitar against Jaheira.

"She put herself in danger. We accompany you to protect you both—however prone you may be to these violent surges," Jaheira said.

"And d-do—do not threaten my wife or I'll do—something!" Khalid said.

Prudence paused. The first time, she'd meant to intimidate an assassin; she'd not thought of herself as especially quick-tempered, and yet she was here—something like dark rage ran through her, and this was her sister. "It's not my intent to threaten you. I—" She carefully stepped back, attempting to clear her head.

"Yeah. OwIdidn'treallyneedmyribsoranything. Dunno what yer doing, sis—" Imoen said.

"You could have called to her—" Prudence said. She sheathed her blade, trying not to reconsider the action. Antagonising Gorion's friends in such a way would be wrong; although she'd already done it... "Let's—neither of us—try that again."

Jaheira sniffed. "I accept your apology. We ought to move on," she said.

"When I'm done here," Xzar called, waving cheerfully at them; he'd made a cut in the ogre's arm with his dagger, and seemed to be draining its fluids into a silver vial he held.

Jaheira spoke volumes with a sigh.

"But you didn't apologise," Xzar whispered to Prudence as they carried on through the forest. No; she couldn't have said, I'm sorry for objecting to you hitting Imoen. A disproportionate response to Imoen getting hurt would have to involve—probably some depraved means of torture involving three randomly selected household objects. But it was better that Jaheira continued to make the assumption.

The path they trod was surrounded by dense growth, the leaves bearing the brightness of the month. A spider—of small variety rather than the usual type featuring in adventurers' lorebooks, its body the size of her little finger—had slipped from its web to the top of her chainmail, probably when she'd brushed against a branch. She plucked it carefully away, returning it to a tree.

"Would you like more? I could find more," Xzar offered; somehow he'd snatched a second spider from the thickly entwined branches, holding it twisting in the air.

"Not at all necessary. Put it back." She'd no fears of the creatures; and if these were the same variety that had occasionally invaded Imoen's bedroom at Candlekeep, they weren't dangerous to humans.

"What if I need it for a spell component?" Its legs continued to rapidly move, twitching against his fingers. "Scream of spider-down-the-neck-of-holy-paladin?"

"I'd be disinclined to follow that plan," she said.

"Ye'd bloody scream, wizard," Montaron said. "Can ye be silent? Much the same to ye, tinwoman." Prudence saw herself included in his glare.

"'Tis quite true," Xzar agreed amiably; the spider escaped from him, retreating to a branch. "Preserve the echoes of one's own terror as a spell component; release it upon the Weave in place of more customary verbal expression. The results can be intriguing—"

"Th' druid's twitching and I reckon I smell hobgoblin," Montaron said.

"Correct enough, halfling," Jaheira said, a scowl to equal Montaron's own set on her face. "There are older tracks here." She pointed to what looked to Prudence like slightly disturbed ground. "Be prepared."

They found that four hobgoblin bodies lay upon the ground of a clearing; tracks of a caravan led into the woods. Two hobgoblins had been killed by arrows, it seemed, the other two wounded by some edged weapon; flies crawled over the corpses, which seemed not dead for more than days. They hadn't taken time to bury the gibberlings and hobgoblins they'd killed before, Prudence remembered.

"It is good that some travellers are not helpless," Jaheira said. "The creatures are often organised well; a lone and somewhat mentally disturbed ogre is one matter, but hobgoblins require different—"

"We came across five of them on our way to the inn," Prudence said, knowing that a better paladin would have politely asked Jaheira for her strategic thoughts.

"Yeah, Pru stabbed one of 'em in the back really nicely—" Imoen began; which wasn't precisely a fair description of what she'd done, and caused another of those glances from Jaheira.

"Ain't no need to boast of it," Montaron said.

"Right, yeah." Imoen screwed up her face in an expression probably intended to recollect the arts of stealth and a general appearance of untrustworthiness.

"I see. I am trained in your weapon as part of my druidic arts, child," Jaheira said to Prudence. "I ought soon to see what I have to teach you."

"Then I'd appreciate a chance to spar."

Quite probably she was about to regret that, Prudence thought; the rest of the party still sat over the midmeal taken in the heat of the early afternoon, and she faced Jaheira and her husband in a quiet space between the trees. No; she could quote Oghma's maxim that no chance for learning ought to be a regret, and it happened to be one she agreed with.

Jaheira brandished her weapon, drawn from her pack; "Start and I'll see if you're teachable," she said. She carried no shield; only the sword in her right hand, a green-hilted scimitar of apparently ordinary metal below the cloth with which they had both bound their blades.

"I also trained in the scimitar, when I grew up," Khalid said, "but now I much prefer a longsword. Do you have Calishite relatives, Prudence? I suppose Gorion said little about your family—b-before he adopted you, I mean."

"Gorion told me my mother was from Silverymoon. I just prefer the balance; more weight to it than the standard longsword," Prudence replied. She lacked the strength to wield the heavy two-handed blades to proper effect, no matter how hard she worked; she preferred a shield's defence and an attack of moderate power. "Do you know much about her?" Gorion had been her parent in every way that mattered, and had seemed reluctant to talk of the past.

"I know little, I am sorry," Khalid said. "We were travelling far from Gorion at the time he took you in."

"To the lesson, child," Jaheira chided. "Begin when you are ready;—you ought to be ready by now." The druid's stance seemed casual, almost careless; but she watched, and her tawny eyes seemed to glitter.

Prudence would have preferred to begin by a defense against her to understand what Jaheira was capable of, but to be given the initiative to seize was an advantage. She stepped forward into a standard feint, prepared to follow it with a strong attack; and the fight began.

Three times disarmed, bruised, and sent to the ground barely before she'd a chance to start. Jaheira didn't seem to be holding back on her hits. Prudence rose again to her feet; perhaps she'd almost begun to understand what the Harper was doing, or perhaps that was an utter delusion. She picked up her shield and weapon once again.

"Your footwork is really quite good," Khalid said. "In my h-homeland, I recall studying the manual of a master called Mai Bhago..."

"Maya Begio, in Common?" Prudence said; she had read the translation upon Sir Rolland's orders, fortunate to have Candlekeep's resources to follow. A useful book; but as far as theory went into practice upon this occasion— "She's very good..."

Jaheira tsked in impatience. A woman who sought efficiency, both in her fights and in general; precision, her blade quick to slip past defences. She was probably faster through refusal to carry a shield, and Prudence considered laying down her own; but she preferred the style, and the point of training was to prepare for real battles.

They stepped toward each other again. "Khalid, would you check on Imoen?" Jaheira said, somewhat distractedly; she slashed at Prudence's right, the edge of her shield.

Patterns— She'd blocked that one. Prudence stepped back carefully; try to last as long as she could. Understand the rhyme and reason and anyone was possible to defeat; even the Warders' Will the Strong never timed his first-quarter lunges quite right and that was where one could move inside his reach and finish it—

"Grass is made of blades; and stars shoot!" Jaheira said. "Nature's servants do not hesitate; yet you fight like a milksop."

Jaheira herself fought—extremely well; like a druid, Prudence supposed. Adventured with her father those years ago. Straightfoward and strong in style, as if she refused to feint as a matter of principle; Jaheira attacked with a low cut quickly followed by a high, as she'd done before, and this time Prudence blocked instead of being clouted forcefully on the side of her head—

Jaheira seemed to give a slight nod. Emboldened, Prudence stepped forward; she lowered the shield slightly, and Jaheira came with a high strike. Prudence responded by raising her shield, catching Jaheira's blade on its edge and bringing her arm up. That, finally, was a chance for a quick thrust, and she'd managed to hit Jaheira for the first time with the flat of her wrapped blade—

And then found herself disarmed again by Jaheira's twist out of the stance, the quickly-following blow to the ribs having her drop to her knees.

"Is that temper of yours subdued, then?" Jaheira said, standing back as Prudence picked herself up again. "Gorion mentioned no violent surges in his correspondence; but it seems we have observed that side of you. I cannot see how you lay claim to your profession."

There was...a proverb. Prudence moved forward, steadily, thinking through Jaheira's strategies; if one considered her testing, again. A sober man in the celestial realms with friends is a saint. An angry man, a drunken man, a grief-stricken man: these show the depths to which he will fall. She conceded no ground to Jaheira, but found herself defending again.

"You're feeble and cowardly in style—if you must you may call it cautious, but it will see you dead—when you are not indulging in unnatural fits of temper and keeping ill company. Paladins are too often an affront to the Balance; are you an affront to them?"

A person who lost control lost the fight. It wasn't right to abuse that in other contexts. But in the Watchers she and Bors had clashed in personality and his attitude to women, and when a spar had turned to verbal taunts her cruelty on his inarticulation had turned him red-faced, hurt, and easy to outmanoeuvre— What would she have chosen to say to provoke Jaheira? Disrespecting nature and druidry; praising necromancy; insulting her husband—which would certainly be wrong for several reasons— Rage might be strong, but failed to last. She hadn't liked, Prudence told herself, that—lack of control.

She hit forward with her shield; that briefly had Jaheira step back. She tried to attack quickly; Jaheira had been correct, in truth. Sword-and-shield held advantage in protection and prompt initiative was the right strategy. Jaheira returned in a powerful riposte. She was stronger, though Prudence had the longer reach; Jaheira stood only up to her shoulders. In presence she certainly didn't give that impression.

Patterns, again. Jaheira was fast and intimidating and did not indulge in elaborate feints; did not conceal that her blade was about to strike home. Prudence blocked her, moving the shield as quickly as she could, and when she saw opportunity struck in return. Jaheira hit her on the upper arm—"In a true battle that would disable you, of course—" and she returned a blow to the thigh, feinting and hitting back. She was starting to—learn something, Prudence thought; she was still mastered by Jaheira's skill, but holding the ground...

And then Jaheira whispered something. Vines started to grow to wrap Prudence's ankles as they had the ogre's, and she started in surprise.

"As if this would never happen in a real fight," Jaheira said scornfully; she stepped forward. The strike Prudence blocked with shield. She needed to free herself; she sliced quickly through the vines on her right ankle, trying to protect against the fierce attack. Jaheira's whispers began again—disrupt a caster, always the rule— Prudence leaned forward and wove past the druid in her casting distraction; the blow connected with her side. The chant finished prematurely, and Jaheira moved aggressively to land another bruise.

"An instant later, and had that been a spell of lightning you should have been a pile of ash and blackened armour upon the forest floor," Jaheira said. "Do not leave yourself open to counterattack; keep a stride forward—" Prudence shielded; the vines around her boots had retreated to the ground. Jaheira's pace only seemed to increase, aggressively fighting in her justified confidence. Prudence worked to keep up, observing her. A longer fight, this one; Prudence felt herself panting, and tried to control her breathing. It did not suit what she was to give up; continue onwards and learn, push for the exhilaration to come— Thrust quart; recover in guard; push the attack in seconde; though Jaheira was unpredictable compared to those formal lessons.

Jaheira signalled when it was over, seemingly tireless still. "Not ill done," she said simply. "I'd not sacrifice angle for speed on those low strikes, though." She carefully unbound her weapon and sheathed it. She chanted, her hand glowing a light blue, and passed it over herself; Prudence did the same to the most tender of her own bruises.

"We finished washing up," Imoen said; she and Khalid had appeared behind them. "She wasn't too rough with you, right, Jaheira?" she laughed. "Pru, Khalid's been telling me about the red dragon they fought this one time, with Mr G., a really big one with magic powers breathing real fire and everything—"

A red dragon. Certainly...impressive. There was so much that Gorion had never talked about, Prudence thought again.

"Khalid, dear," Jaheira said.

"Y-yes, Jaheira?"

His wife sighed again. "I will continue to guide us. We will keep the pace."

The way Jaheira led them was quiet enough, punctuated only once by a stray small group of gibberlings. The horizon was patterned with the red of the sinking sun when they walked past Beregost's threshold, and the sky had begun to darken. It seemed a busy town; many yet carried out their business through the streets, and the faint sound of singing from some tavern blended with the noise of the closing marketplace.

Landrin's house, to the south-east of town, was sealed, fenced, and derelict, the grass starting to seem scraggly and the walls dirtied. The windows were boarded and nailed in place. Its desertion by its spell-experimenting owner had been just over a tenday past.

"So this is the site of the infestation? We will clear it on the morrow, after I have requested spells to drain poison," Jaheira said. "Had you mentioned this earlier, Prudence, I should have asked the Oak Father at my vigils of yesterday's sundown. The venom of a giant spider is often deadly to the novice adventurer."

Quite a pointed hint at the end there, though Jaheira was right that she ought to have thought ahead. "I think we can deal with a few spiders, Jaheira—" Prudence began. In the darkness beyond the boarded-up and magically warded windows, something black shifted. A lot of something black, apparently. Large hairy legs so close together that the house seemed almost fit to rupture from them; it seemed that if anything Landrin had understated the consequences of her magical accident...

"I could only be sure of making the casting twice. That would be once for you, once for Imoen," Jaheira said—another snipe, apparently, at Montaron and Xzar. "If that proves insufficient: it would be a shame to lose Gorion's child to a mere spider."

"I think much c-c-clearer and fight much better after r-rest, myself," Khalid said. "But the road to Nashkel will be longer, when we set out upon it..."

Finish this small task, and then have the spellcasters study afresh for the next part of the journey. "Any area-effect spells, Xzar?" Prudence said.

"No, I won't rescue that kitten from the tree no matter what you say! I have my standards and Nashkel is where—" Xzar shook his head wildly. "Oh, those. A trap of fatty grease oozed from the aching muscles of the ogre. I call the spider bodies when you fetch them."

That sounded a valid enough strategy. "Good. What do you think, Jaheira? Slow them down, and we ought to be able to surround the garden and pick most of them off at ranged distance. If we get in too much trouble, Imoen has a potion." Much of Landrin's fencing seemed intact enough to hold spiders within.

"As you insist," Jaheira said, not without a sigh. "An Entanglement would be appropriate."

"A light, Xzar?" Prudence said. It grew dark; far easier to aim with a light source at hand.

"Just studying the tattered walls meantimes," he said. "My sorts of lock, not Montaron's. Flaking away like six-day dead skin; the legs scratching at the mage's barriers within; perhaps some fascinating effect of poison penetrating the chosen Weave-fabric—and make these mundane demands, and I could do no other."

Xzar cast a magelight into the air; a green ball flew from his hands and took residence some distance above their heads, upon which it altered itself to the shape of a large, ethereal skull. Landrin's garden shone with the unnatural light.

"Ye'll make us popular as always, I can tell," Montaron muttered.

Xzar continued spellcasting; the grease that came into being was a white-brown substance that spread itself across the grass. Landrin had told her the codephrase to bring down her wards; which, it seemed Xzar had said, were dying already. Prudence said it aloud, her crossbow ready; and the spiders came. They burst from the failing door and windows in a thick mass of green and black.

Jaheira's entanglement reached around the greasetrap to tangle their legs. The first flow of the creatures had been as fierce as if a dam over some strong-flowing river had suddenly collapsed, and more came following from the house, crawling over the bodies of the other spiders; they slowly advanced. Prudence had already fired her crossbow twice into their midst, aiming for the reflection of magelight into their eight eyes. She loaded another bolt as quickly as she could; it would be harder to miss than hit given the number of the creatures, though a giant spider was more vulnerable about the eyes than in the thick-skinned carapace. At least, according to lore. The spider she aimed at was stopped in its crawl; it fell violently back, replaced by more clambering over its body. Six sets of ranged weapons set about the field, keeping back the tide of spiders; she could imagine the positioning in her mind's eye as though she flew above the town. The objective: simply to contain and put down Landrin's spiders. Three more bolts; a crossbow wasn't the fastest of weapons, but efficient in damage-dealing. She kept loosing her attacks until the spiders had begun to escape the grease; they came to her, fangs chittering, and she exchanged her crossbow for shield and blade.

Try not to get poisoned, she could imagine, was the main point. The spiders were fast, she learned quickly; a bite scraped along her mail, those large fangs. She hit at it with her shield, followed by a slice into its head; they couldn't be allowed to pass into the town. The giant spiders were above half her height, bulky and wide-legged; and still many of them remained. (She would not run away.) Imoen and Xzar, behind the most well-reinforced part of the fence, continued to loose missiles in the way of the spiders; Jaheira was nearest to her, throwing back the sorely wounded creatures with her staff. Prudence kept to her stance, carefully balanced; struck at the central spider-flesh. Blood—cool, dark blood—fell over her; the spiders came, and she thought she could fight these. At first she focused only on killing those before her—spiders, a non-existent moral dilemma for a paladin, simple predators; slash widely enough to keep them back, use the shield against the dangerous venom. When she looked to Khalid and Jaheira, she saw that more bodies had fallen about them; and Montaron, too fast to allow them to bite, stabbing easily into the underbelly of one, leaving corpses piled around him, slipping and weaving between their circles.

She fought for awareness of the battle; slice there, catch near the central eyes, and it fell back; let the venom take her shield instead of flesh. Another near hit; she did not wish to prove Jaheira's negative appraisal. A sharp leg scraped her shin bloody before she knocked it back by her shield. An arrow—that would be Imoen—flew into its head. The crowd of spiders was falling, at last. Khalid and Jaheira stood next to each other; Montaron, rooted in the grease, stabbed viciously at one with still-twitching limbs. The dark bodies littered the ground.

"A-any...any left in the house, dear?" Khalid pried a spider's limb from his mail. "I do s-so...hate these. So many legs."

They marched through Landrin's deserted home; the wooden shelves were splintered and broken, fragments of glass and pottery spilled across the floor. Khalid gingerly turned over the fallen bed to find the stained pair of old boots the gnome had wanted, fortunately intact aside from one jagged hole torn through them. A few smaller spiders still quivered in the corners, until the group dealt with them as the others.

Xzar carefully scraped a dark substance from an overturned workbench into a vial from his belt.

"Wizard?" Jaheira said. "I know I will regret asking, but: what are you doing?"

"Samples of this fascinating process. Normal common garden or household spiders alchemically transmuted into these venomous beasts with eyes that see in the dark—'tis much like the hidden mirror at the end of the hole of the rabbits that takes the fifth sign in the ascendant and the trammelled runes in the second aspect—"

"Oh, I see," Jaheira said, conveying by her tone that she, along with all reasonable people, could not in the least and would lack all inclination to do so. "I cannot possibly imagine how allowing the likes of you to research these odd experiments could cause harm."

"You don't? Goody! I keep telling Monty, you people are nice. Even if you're fond of yelling, my lady druid." Prudence was not sure whether the sarcasm was deliberately ignored; Xzar seemed to quickly finish taking his scrapings, and knelt down to feel along the floor. Jaheira's expression turned particularly thunderous.

"Don't dare to call me your lady, creature, and I warn you that—"

"Here's the wine," Prudence said. She'd found one bottle that had escaped with only a superficial crack in its glass; Cloudberry Confection No Turnips Allowed seemed to be written across the label in small, elaborate script. "That's all we were asked to do. We can go now." And attempt to be civil to each other.

"Leaving those as such?" Jaheira pointed to the spider bodies in the garden. "I can hasten Nature's reclaiming of their bodies to benefit the soil. A natural use."

Indeed; they hadn't exactly managed to beautify Beregost by their activities. "Thank you, that's good." Prudence looked at the spider bodies that also remained on the inside of the house; grotesque and bleeding. "If you have the orison for water creation, maybe indoors as well..."

"We are adventurers, not kitchenmaids," Jaheira said stiffly. "Now, if you'll get out of the way, necromancer..."

Xzar screamed; he fell backwards to the ground, clutching his left hand to the chest. Prudence instinctively reached for her weapon, but there wasn't anything visible—

"Mousetrap!" he howled. The wire and wood in his hands had twisted and bent his fingers; Prudence winced at the look of it. The device was almost the size of Winthrop's rattraps. Xzar gestured quickly, though, in the direction of a dark corner of the ceiling; white light flashed between his injury and a small spider perched there. The spider's body fell as a husk to the floor. He flexed a healed hand. "Have the kindness not to begin before I'm done gathering spell components, will you?" he said to Jaheira.

"Unnatural and—"

Prudence broke into the impending squabble. "He helped fight, he can take what he needs," she said. "As long as it's only what you need, Xzar. Balance of nature."

"I do need it." He moved to the top of Landrin's doorstep, where lay one of the larger spiders, relatively intact and pierced by crossbow bolts in its midsection. "Monstrous spiders have excellent night vision. That's rather important."

"Ewww," Imoen said emphatically, leaning upon Landrin's fencing; Prudence stood next to her, waiting for Xzar to finish. His cuts into the spiders' bodies were efficient, as precise as any she'd been taught how to make.

A garden full of dead spiders and a necromancer further dismembering selected samples. "I know. But it's—adventuring. I'm sorry, Immy, you could've been safe back at Candlekeep, even though you've helped a lot..." She didn't want to drag Imoen into anything that would hurt her.

"Yeah, no," Imoen said. "I don't want to go back, and I don't want to stop knowing that cutting up spiders is completely disgusting."

"Fair enough," Prudence said. "But what Jaheira and I do—I'm more a fighter than a healer, but it's also necromancy, technically, and back home at the Temple—"

"I know. You sliced up innocent little smothered frogs to learn about bodyparts," Imoen said. Prudence had done her share of service at Oghma's temple, helping the priests and learning about the healing arts before she'd gained the ability to cast herself.

"Not only frogs, even. You remember Master Ibn-Jumay's will?" Prudence said.

"The weird one—right, yeah, and I want a second eww on that," Imoen said. A cleric of Oghma, the author of a hundred treatises upon healing, and Faerun's foremost expert upon catalepsy, the Master had left written instructions on what he had wished done with his own body before his burial; Prudence had watched the dissection. Most clerics did not do such things because of the obvious problems, but Ibn-Jumay had willed it so in the name of enabling others to learn about healing. It is right to be sickened by blood and pain, especially that caused by evil acts—but to be useful in the field, a paladin must know when to suppress that compulsion—she had read. One's senses became accustomed to such things. She had not found it unusually difficult to kill her first gibberling, three years ago.

"It's not pleasant, but—that's not the standard of judgement," Prudence said.

"Nah. There'll be other reasons, I reckon," Imoen said simply.

Xzar finished his plundering, and at last Jaheira began her chant underneath the magelight; the earth itself rose at her command, shaking such that Prudence was relieved to be standing some distance away. The spiders' bodies sunk into the soil, enveloped by its upheaval about them. When the dirt closed over their remnants the grass atop it seemed to have grown slightly taller and thicker. That would have to be quite a powerful casting, Prudence thought; she saw Montaron's head turned to Jaheira, watching her.

"About time we're done with the blasted charity," he said, though he knew that Landrin had offered pay. "If'n we waste any more time, the next den of spiders may just live long enough." They walked through the streets, crossing town for their night's accommodation.

Imoen stretched her arms in the air. "Looks a nice town, those parts of it without spiders. How many inns here again?"

"Four; and Khalid and I can vouch for Feldepost's," Jaheira said, pointing to the lighted dwelling ahead of them. "You would be well advised to rest while you can, Imoen. There will be more than a few spiders to fight."

A small child plucked at Prudence's cloak, just where they neared the doorway to the inn's welcome. "Please, miss, are you an adventurer? My Bubbles is up in that tree and won't come down..."

The cat's mew above them sounded loudly in the night.

No gratitude, children these days!, Prudence thought; and felt dismayed at sounding like one of the older monks already. The little girl had taken her cat quickly and rushed to the sound of a parent's calling, with not so much as a thanks for its retrieval.

"See? Toldja cats are mean," said Imoen, who had refused the tree-climbing adventure despite her unbested talents in that domain. Prudence gingerly touched the laid-open scratches that felt as if they covered half her face in her own blood. 'Bubbles' had defended its skyward position with a spitting, clawing fury that would not have seemed out of place upon some fiery and hellish creature of evil. With spider blood soaked into her clothing, twigs in her hair, sleeves scraped by bark and a face like this, Prudence could imagine how disreputable she must look; but she would not use healing powers divinely granted to serve the forces of good upon cat scratches. She would not. She reclaimed her chainmail, pulling it again over her clothing.

"Hold still," Jaheira said, taking her arm; and touched her face with a blue-glowing hand. "There."

"Thank you," she said; but Jaheira had matched ahead again, leading the way to the inn's door. The torches and hearth shone brightly, indoors, sending flickering reflections on the bottles behind the bar and upon the polished frames of the engravings set upon the walls; Prudence's eyes adjusted to the light.

There was a burly man, seated on a wooden bench near to the entrance; he stood, and spoke loudly. "'Ere there now! I don't like your type in here!" He carried a flail in his belt—one usable for threshing, and his weathered clothing suggested a farmer.

They were quite tired, and the tavern seemed far from full. "There seems enough bar for us all," Prudence said.

"Our type being—" Jaheira said; Montaron spoke almost at the same time as her, "'An' our type, that'd be—"

Oh— she realised; that was bad—

"Adventurers," a second man said. "Ye ought to leave him alone. Marl's had enough to drink."

"Oh, that makes it perfectly fine then, an' I'm bloody Elminster's pointy hat," Montaron said. "Pint of ale. Mad wizard gets milk."

"It's you—freakish adventurers," Marl said; he lurched forward, near to Prudence. "I'm sick of all you freakish adventurers going out, consorting with gods know what, and dragging your trouble back into my home town! What do you say to that?"

"That you've—probably had enough to drink, like your friend said, sir," Prudence said. "We're just trying to do what we think's right." As if a few tasks and running away from Gorion's murderer counted for much, for her; but Jaheira and Khalid had served their cause for some time.

"Ya think it's right?" Marl wheeled around to stare at her with rheumy eyes, jabbing his forefinger at her shoulder. "Messing up the local economy with treasure robbed from some grave? Upset the balance of nature?—"

"That we do not do," Jaheira said; Marl ignored her.

"You flash your fancy magic around—" Fortunately Xzar seemed not to hear that. "Swagger around in shiny armour and wave your swords? Pretend you clerics can heal everything?" Letting the farmer have his tirade did no harm, Prudence thought; his gestures pointed at her rather than went to the flail at his waist. "And because of it maybe somebody's son thinks it's fun, and goes out and gets himself killed? Someone ought to pound you to the ground—take it out of your hide—"

Somebody's son thinks it's fun, and goes out and gets himself killed— Marl's hands were reaching to his flail, now. "You lost your son?" Prudence said. There wouldn't be a fight if she could do anything about it. "I'm sorry. I—"

"He was a good boy 'til your kind came through town! Filled his head with nonsense they did and took him off away to a dungeon somewhere, and the next I hear of him he's dead—" He was quite a tall man, heavily built, dark-haired and with weathered lines crossing his cheeks.

"He's going to attack you, mummy," Xzar said.

"—My father was killed by evil adventurers three days ago," she said. Her hands were raised well away from her scabbard, to the universal gesture of calm down and settle this peaceably. "I know how—"

Marl stopped his reach for the weapon, gesturing at her instead. "Your father? 'Tis close enough to the natural course that way—" he lost his son, she could forgive him that for a death so far from natural— "But Kennair 'twas my only son; didn't get anything to mourn over—" Marl was raging, shambling; Prudence could feel no fear of him.

"Kennair was his name? He must have been brave, to choose to go," Prudence said.

"'Twas your fool stories of monsters and gold that took him! He'd have stayed were it not for bastards like you." Marl faced her, his voice shaking; one always sought to fix blame for losses—

"My father might have lived if he hadn't protected me. Did Kennair want—to help the Realms?"

"He wanted to stay home! He wanted to take over the farm and settle down—maybe apprentice with Thunderhammer over the winter. He never wanted to adventure."

"Didn't he?" Prudence said. "Sometimes the Realms call and you go. It's not just because of stories; if you feel that there's a need for you— My father did it because he wanted to learn more, and because he wanted to work for balance."

"That boy was a firebrand if ever there was, Marl," his friend said. "Yer blaming these folk fer what couldn't be helped..."

"No! He was settling down! He wanted...he wanted..." Marl cried out.

"What did he want?" Prudence said, as gently as she could.

"That new plow he bought last year," Marl's friend said. "He got the gold by helping clear kobolds near Ulgoth's Beard. He wanted to make a difference, make the Realms a bit safer. Just like these folk, most likely."

"He could have just stayed home," Marl said. His friend helped him to sit down. "By Chauntea, if he'd stayed home, Dunkin, he'd have lived..."

Prudence waited with him; this was not the sort of wound she could heal with a quick breath of a prayer. "Your son sounds a good man, taken too soon. Doing what he was meant. If you know you're made to go, you can't stay at home forever." She'd wished to leave Candlekeep for more than a year beforehand; but it was Gorion's own word that had her stay...

"And then you're dead in a few days." A few hours, for Gorion. "What kind of fool thing is that?" he wept.

"Because even if you die—" And Candlekeep had rather an accurate compendium of paladin's mortality statistics. "You're doing what you have to do. Trying to keep the Realms safe for other people. Protecting what you care about—"

Run, daughter, Gorion had said—

"I'd hope and pray that he'd no regrets, on what he wanted to do," she said. "If you'll suffer my company, I'll buy a round; let me toast Kennair's memory with you."

Marl watched her; as if gauging her understanding. "'Twould be fitting enough, I suppose," he said finally. "Kennair Nethalin! Rest ye well."

"Aye. And to others fallen," Dunkin said.

Kennair Nethalin; Gorion. To Rolland and Tamas, old and in natural rest; Ibn-Jumay. That they had no regrets, on what they wanted to do in life.

She raised her head, when Dunkin aided his friend to depart; caught Jaheira's glance.

"If you are done encouraging farmers to cry," Jaheira said, "then you and Imoen are at the second door on the right, up the stairs. I suppose it was best to avoid conflict; as anyone could see."

"Certainly." She hadn't quite finished her drink; two were enough to bring her to—some melancholy. Winthrop had also stocked this kind of apple cider, though the taste of this brew differed; far less sweet. Imoen, she'd last seen talking to that incredibly handsome stout man, then stepping neatly away to the corners of the inn's shadows; and Xzar, carefully and methodically crumbling fragments of the inn's onion-and-mushroom pastry into a series of small piles on the side of a tray. She watched Jaheira move upstairs, her husband's arm linked through hers. The dancing fire to the front of the room was beginning to fade.

"I saw you," Xzar interrupted her absent thoughts. "They call it enchantment if it's from a wizard and not a divine. If not for words stopping him in his tracks, he would have taken up the flail; priestly charming against the will."

"It wasn't enchantment at all," she said, having the feeling they were about to switch rhetorical sides in defence of verbiage. Kennair Nethalin: she had learned from Marl that he had been slightly taller than Khalid, with his mother's red hair and a strong hand with a hammer. "Taking the time to listen to people, convince them—it's better than using magic and lasts longer." Something of the poison of Gorion's death had been drained from her, through speaking of it. She turned to the wizard;

"I know the spell," he said, "and this one time while we were travelling through the woods higher north near the camp I charmed a skunk and..."

"Does this story end the way I think it's going to end?"

"...And Montaron shot it down with a crossbow bolt while I was calling it near. A shame. It's a reasonably complicated spell, when one doesn't have the ability to pretend that talking itself works."

"How can you say it doesn't? If you can avoid a fight by talking the problem through—" and Marl drawing a flail in his grief, six armed adventurers in his local tavern, that would have been a horrendous recipe for disaster— "So be it, unless it's something one has to face sooner or later. An easy thing to try, and more pleasant."

"No—I've got it." Xzar looked down at the black patterns inked across his fingernails. "People pay surprising attention to offensive magic in their approximate direction. As for you I've heard voices that reminded me far more of cheese-graters; despite scrapes and scratches probably very few humans accuse you of troll blood in the family tree; and you're tall enough that Monty wouldn't complain about people not paying attention. 'Tis unsurprising that such works for you, but do not pretend it universal. The rabbits really don't like that."

Aside from the last sentence; "Dare I point out what you're doing at the moment?" she said. "Most people are capable of at least trying to negotiate first, and I doubt I've significant advantage. Ought I pretend I've a tumour of the pharyngos, or start stooping, if I want to convince you?"

He sighed. "No more than you ought to cut away my link to the Weave by subtle turns of a sword's edge," he said simply. "It's a simple fact of advantages; which both, mostly, translate in the end to different ways to know how to kill things."

"That's not what I'm supposed to be; and I hope you realise that," Prudence said. "Paladins fight, but we're not killers."

"Ha!—" He laughed, the tone slightly too high. "No, you're going about trying to make people feel safe. Make good people feel safe," he repeated. "In between those fascinating rabbity shapes on the dark walls behind—"

"—Yes, the first part of that's much closer. Um. Have you ever seen a healer who...concentrates on psychological health? I met one or two who came through Candlekeep; some of them are even nice..."

"Oh. You think you want to help me, mother—" he added, a sudden venom forced into the epithet, glaring as fiercely as Jaheira or Montaron.

"I'm hardly that—" she flung back at him, hoping to drag him into something resembling reality—

He paused a moment. "Sword; armour; muscles; contemporary," he said more slowly. "Understood, Rue."

The herb of regret; an improvement upon Imoen's Pru or Prune, at least.

"If you thought that if it was Montaron who led and I who followed, you were wrong," he said, speaking in a swift, low voice; "Monty has a wonderfully practical mind as you seem to occasionally appreciate, and fights and reminds me of mundane caretaking; but it is I who decide where we travel and what our larger path will be and the strategies that drive us, issuing most instructions about what we are obliged to do; and if you believed me somehow unaware of what I am then that is also a lie; I know and own my mind and I would not have myself and all creation and invention destroyed; Xzar take the potion and rest you're normal but that's not true and I'd remain seeing through and betwixt and between it all by choice; and I can read and I've magic to hurt others and if it's pity spared then there's none I need or want; and if that is the substance of your help I should fight to resist being changed and taken. Is that approximately coherent, or ought I to explain in terms I've tried really hard to make as sanity-dependent as possible?"

"Coherent in—a few parts," Prudence said, fighting the temptation to return with an irritated monologue of her own. "You're intelligent—" Unconventionally so; but— "It's your choice, Xzar."

He was quiet again for a few moments; reassured, perhaps. "I almost wish I didn't believe you when you say that," he said. "But, truthfully, if I didn't see so much that you law-shackled types completely miss—then we'd hardly have anything to chat about, would we?"

Truthfully—he was probably right about that. And why not? He was troubled, but he was independent to choose what he wished to be; and becoming drawn into these arguments within their quest was—an interesting challenge.

A woman was removing plates and tankards from the tables, quite loudly.

"—And spider eyes won't pickle themselves," Xzar said.

"Nor will armour clean itself. Good night." And best to check on Imoen...


	3. Chapter 3

"Rook to queen's rook three."

She felt almost—contented. As if some of the bitterness of Gorion's death had been removed permanently, through sharing Marl's loss; she knew her resolve to continue. Outside, it seemed a bright day had come; she'd wakened before sunrise, repacked for the road, taken herself running and through each standard sword-form. Fresh air in her lungs, exercise, the sheer physical pleasure of challenging her body; truly invigorating.

Upon returning to Feldepost's to share in breaking the fast, she'd been tempted by Xzar into chess. Without the aid of a board. A challenge of memory, even without his unconventional ruleset.

"Knight from king's four to king's knight three captures priest." If she remembered the position rightly.

"You were on king's six. My caster yet lives," he gloated.

"I'm not sure I believe you. You did say misleading the opponent about the location of pieces was in these rules." She'd lost five pawns, a rook, and her other knight to his queen's priest and two pawns; but she was in a position to make him find some losses in return before the inevitable checkmate.

"It's a classical game of wit—misinformation has to form part of it, much as I despise illusions...but this time I insist. King's six."

"King's four. It can't have been king's six."

"Six." He crossed his arms stubbornly.

"Four," she maintained.

Imoen interrupted. "You moved to king's _five_ , and do you know how incredibly boring you are?" She lightly smacked the back of Prudence's head. "Boring's still better than crazy-creepy, though, wizard, I'm not complainin'."

Already past time, she supposed, to leave for Nashkel; Imoen seemed ready, Jaheira nearby. "Concession in return for a rematch, Xzar?" She would have lost that one, eventually; but it had been interesting. He adapted quickly, brought together combinations that she hadn't thought of before. And there were counters that she wished to try in a second chance...

"I barely got to start to unleash the black queen's devastating power," he sniffed. "Build a Mystra's Strike and in six moves annihilate the white armies—"

"You couldn't have moved the queen's rook in place for that," Prudence said, carefully picturing the board; she'd a left flank ready to advance. "Azuth's Gambit, maybe, if I didn't block..."

"And if you did: I'd lose the other priest, but you'd gain a pawn's change. But I'd take your other queen in the Sothillisian's Deceit—"

"Bailan's Entrapment, perhaps..." she tried. "You'd win the war of attrition, but I'd guess not inside fifteen moves..."

" _Incredibly boring_!" Imoen repeated.

"Yes—we should go. _Basileus tethnekenai_ ; but we'll settle it again later," Prudence said.

"They call me mad," Xzar said, standing and brushing his robes; "if they're courteous they call me fey; they call my mage's speciality iniquitous; they call my experiments insane—but they have never called me _boring_."

Imoen giggled. "Boring, boring, boring. Now I know what to say to you."

"In that case, you're pink and annoying and practically a reincarnated chipmunk," he said loudly.

It was childish. Prudence snorted.

"Aww, shut up, ya plug-tailed trollop."

"I cast Insult Turning before you said that!" He waved his hands dramatically in the air. "It bounces back and lands on you!"

"Oy, that gullynapping necromancer just called your only sister a trollop, Pru!" Imoen complained. "Defend me?"

"It's wrong to call people trollops," Prudence recited from Winthrop. "Or buffleheaded, gullynappers, rumdukes, or mutton mongerers; or annoying, or chipmunks." There, approximately fair and even-handed.

"You're quite right, young lady," Xzar said in Imoen's direction, adopting the tones of the most fussy of senior monks. "She can be rather prim and proper—repressed, by my diagnosis, as a consequence of the profession—"

"Hey, I'm not _that_ repressed—"

"Heh. If'n rum _jake veal_ mongering riffraff like that are sayin' it—"

"Compared to those who are goody-goody slanderous fiends as those inhabitants of the third plane on the left turn of the lower reach—"

"Look, if you start talking about the finer and totally eww points of demon summoning, I'm totally out of—"

"Yes! Start with the mortal skull of a scorpion—the exoskeleton's cephalothorax in its innard-stripped glory—against a candleflame, white wax—and perhaps a demon or devil's—"

"If you gain some impulse to _summon a demon_ between here and Nashkel," Prudence lectured—which was an unlikely prospect, but the man was unpredictable—"then we'll all die _yelling at you_ —"

"Yeah, yer all _fluffy_ headed an'—"

"And you're a big meany and I'll tell Monty!"

"And I suppose you are amusing...in a _what in all the Nine Hells is wrong with you_ kind of way," Jaheira's voice rang out strongly; and conquered all that lay before it.

—

Still early morning outside the inn. Farmland surrounded the town, and they skirted the fields of growing crops and cows. Perhaps staying longer and properly seeing Beregost would have been interesting—Firebead Elvenhair maintained a house here—but they'd the task to complete. The southbound road lay to the east; but Jaheira's path led them through forest trail.

"We ought to have some sort of strategy in mind, if we do come suddenly upon—bandits or more ogres or similar," Prudence said.

"Ye attract attention and blows—th' rest of us get the job done?" Montaron said. The thing she found most annoying about that, Prudence thought, was the assumption that she wasn't capable of being discreet. It wasn't as if she dressed like a Tormtar (not that there was anything wrong with that). But giving Montaron a chance to use his ability for stealth; that had _worked_ with the wizard on the inn's steps.

"Well—a frontline distraction along those lines seems to work, if a smaller number." Ogres supposedly tended to hunt in small groups or alone. "If it's the bandits, with archers—" By the rumours, they'd formidable bowmen equipped with strongly enchanted arrows—ice that froze their victims to death, by one tale, black demonfire by another. "We've cover on this route, so if it's Jaheira casting herself and staying near Imoen and Xzar, while the three of us get to them..." Jaheira was both a powerful caster, and had the ability to protect the least armoured of the group.

"'Tis w-wise to exercise caution," Khalid said. "P-probably we will not be attacked, but..." He lifted his shield briefly; Prudence nodded.

"And enemy casters—" That man who had called himself Tarnesh, one of the Friendly Arm's guards had said. "Xzar's energy drain spell worked well against the protective magics, and—"

Montaron grunted. "Ain't no caster functions long with a sword located in the guts. Don't fancy it up."

"And first," Xzar added, "I've a real daisy chain—" He held three genuine flowers, plaited together in a passable chain. "And secondly, you're wrong, Rue—Larloch's minor drain does not subvert on the protective axis at all. It was those cursed Mirror Images, which appear at the three-fourth point of the second spindle-turning of illusive distraction—"

"—Law of Opposing Schools, then," Prudence said automatically. She could remember Gorion teaching the Circle of Eight, illusion's silver diametrically across from necromancy's black. Fighting alongside and against spellcasters, one ought to know these things, though not the casting details. "You should do that again if we have to fight another wizard, unless you can think of something better."

"I have every confidence in the vile necromancer of daisy chains to do so," Jaheira said flatly.

"Dead flowers?" Xzar suddenly looked...wrongly enthusiastic. "Yes, I killed the flowers, didn't I? I could create rotten zombie reanimated daisy chains, and—"

"And perhaps the only things they'd be useful for would be provoking Jaheira and maybe tripping very clumsy people," Prudence said. "Stick to counteracting illusion."

"It's a complex strategic web," Xzar said composedly. "The illusion could be an illusion of an illusion, if the bad wizard expects me to try that. Or I could expect that the bad wizard expects that I expect him-or-her to try that. Or the bad wizard could expect that I expect that the bad wizard expects that I expect him-or-her to try that, or—"

"You're familiar with the spell Occam's Unnecessary Confusion?" Prudence said.

"There's no such..." He placed the flowers securely inside his robes and stared frostily at her. "You're _very_ bad."

"Hold," Khalid said. "T-there are voices..."

Two ogrillons, crashing through the forest. Neither as large as the lone ogre; but equally willing to attack travellers.

"Unnatural creatures. Oh, omnipresent authority figure?" Jaheira said in Prudence's direction, her hands already moving towards a casting. "Pray, what meagre task would you care to assign—"

The ogrillions covered their ground quickly; long legs almost the girth of treetrunks. They'd mottled skin some shade between green and grey—smaller than the other ogre, and hardly _anything_ like illustrations in instruction manuals— A heavy club swung through the air; Prudence's hilt had found its way to her hand, she was grateful to realise, and she slashed to the ogrillion's right side, but Jaheira's casting stopped abruptly. The druid, forced to step back from the club's path, took up her staff. She dealt the ogrillion a hefty blow, but it barely faltered. Its meaty fist cut through the air; Prudence ducked below it, just far enough to escape.

Khalid held off the other ogrillion, standing his ground; she could hardly spare to look, but one had to _know_ what was happening. At first she couldn't see Montaron, then it became clear; he hacked efficiently at the ogrillion's kneecaps from behind, hamstringing it—

Jaheira's oak met the club, and her body bent into the blow; too strong to fully meet. Prudence slashed forward, while the ogrillon flailed. It seemed to lurch forward, as if trying to brush Jaheira away. If it did—

Imoen was behind them; an arrow, fired high into the air, flew above the ogrillion's head. Jaheira kept control of the battle; the regular beat of her staff hardly faltered. It ought to be an obvious rhythm—Prudence tried to keep up with Jaheira, to read the gaps where a sharp point could break through the ogrillion's reactions. In truth the staff seemed to bruise the thick skin little, and the words _if treating it as another test_ flashed across Prudence's mind. As if distracted by thought—the club caught her a glancing, painful blow on her left shoulder; she stumbled back, her grip on her shield suddenly numb and limp.

" _Your death is divined; watch this face of it and know your end_!" Xzar's voice, loudly projected. In the air was a vision tangible in its form, one such as to be terrifying to most: the large skull of an ogre or ogrillion, bleached white and surrounded by licking flames of green, hurtling quickly through the air and above Khalid's head—

( _Query: how exactly was he carrying an ogrillion skull?_ )

 _Couldn't lose concentration, couldn't lose here_ — She'd cut into the ogrillion's flesh, but its wounds had seemed only to make it more infuriated. Its stained fist swept toward her face, and she heard the sound of the skull exploding nearby. A flare of brighter green, pale fragments falling about it like snowflakes. The ogrillion's fist went above her helm as she leaned down and struck forward, her left arm still numbed.

The end of Jaheira's staff hit firmly to the ogrillion's windpipe; it fell back. The slashes and arrow-wounds on its flesh seeped ogre-like blood. Khalid and Montaron had brought down the second, in brief advantage of the distraction. Prudence saw the ogrillion yet breathing, Jaheira's staff subduing it; it was not as if they could escort a monster to the town as prisoner, and it carried a human scroll bound to it, and it was slowly bleeding.

She angled her blade carefully, for the ogrillion's throat. A quick death. Montaron, she noticed, seemed to be doing rather the same thing; and Jaheira watched her again, that expression upon her face.

 _To Mirianne of Beregost. My dearest_ , the note read, _I have arrived safely in Amn...The halfling I hired to carry this struck me as an honest enough chap_...

So the ogrillion carried evidence ready-made of preying upon others; so close, withal, to the town. Prudence looked down at one of the white fragments, blown by the wind, and saw a small cocoon where bone had seemed to be. Lying near the ogrillion it had injured was what Reevor's fanatical discipline had her know for a rat skull. A transmutation; dramatic indeed.

She had to heal herself; it took more than she had expected. The pain hit her at the moment the battle was clearly over. But she could piece her own shoulder back together in the quick space of a prayer, scapular and humeral head settled in place, nerves and muscles set to proper structure. Khalid and Montaron seemed unharmed.

"That we were attacked so near to Beregost," Jaheira said, "betrays the state of affairs."

"Right, yeah," Imoen said. "Guess they weren't as big and scary as that other ogre, but flaming skulls flung around by your _own side_... Um. Pretty jewels?"

"That may have belonged to the author of that letter," Jaheira said.

"No, thankf—" Prudence broke off; the letter-writer hadn't been the messenger attacked, but either way someone had probably been murdered. "We're still close to the town. Better go and deliver it." Mirianne of Beregost would want news of her husband; would perhaps have been worrying for some time.

The generous gift of a ring of protection triumphed over Montaron's attitude; in the straw-drawing, it went to Imoen, which made tactical sense to protect a lightly armoured archer (and she would have wanted to protect _her sister_ , Prudence knew—).

The retrodden path at first loomed before them; and then they moved deeper into the wilderness between Beregost and Nashkel. To take the main road would have only invited ambush. Muddy ground; it must have rained here in the recent past. All but Jaheira squelched uncomfortably through the darkened soil. Evergreens stood in ragged clumps, near the edge of a brownly clouded pool; and the wizard muttered and gestured to himself, stepping across the thick pale roots of a wide-spread yew. In the shadow of a small hill grew a yellow-shaded moss, narrowly leaved and blooming: sphalotha.

Jaheira said the name, pointing. "Have they taught you that much of the healing arts in that fortress?"

"Dried, can be used on clean wounds as a coagulate. Possible substitute for cessatre leaves in healing potions. Otherwise used with fennel in a liver remedy," Prudence said. A qualified herbalist she was undoubtedly not, but within limited bounds she'd the relevant portions of Koushan _'s Compleat Herbal_ to memory.

"That only shows me of your memory," Jaheira said; she bent down in a quick movement, and efficiently detached a few of the plants. "Nature's resources ought not to be wasted. Have you used this in reality, or read a few books?"

"It's fairly rare near Candlekeep. Sometimes in autumn it's gathered, cleaned, and dried over heated stones for a day. How do you prepare it?" Prudence said, politely enough, she thought; as a druid, Jaheira would know some useful facts.

"Over artificial heat? 'Tis not the way," Jaheira said, and looked rather satisfied at the chance to correct. "The natural air preserves texture and properties much better. I would be surprised that it was of any use whatsoever to those monks."

Candlekeep's procedures were founded on a history of rational, recorded experimentation of over a thousand years. Jaheira was an expert in this area. Where they disagreed—was it not a fact that a caster's own expectations and will would guide the path of a potion or spell-brewing? "It was of considerable use," Prudence said, "the priests kept a continuous heat casting in the cellars and—"

A high scream behind them; and the wizard fell forward into the muddy pond while Imoen, behind him, dived down as if to grab something scuttling through the wilderness. Jaheira twitched, and made no move. After a second Xzar raised his mud-soaked head; like a—half-drowned and entirely furious cat, being the metaphor that came to Prudence's mind. Khalid, nearest, gravely offered him a hand.

"Got it—!" Imoen stood up. "Big bad necromancer, attacked by cute little baby bunny rabbit who's a little dearum sweetum..." She carried a small white bundle of fur and cooed to it.

"Ye caught midmeal?" Montaron said. Imoen stamped a foot.

"No! That's just cruel and _mean_! It's only a baby!" Imoen had both cooked and eaten veal and lamb with appetite and enthusiasm in the past, Prudence knew well; but...

"Release the wild animal back to nature where it belongs, Imoen," Jaheira commanded. "Is none in this group possessed of right mind?"

" _Stop touching me_!" Xzar cried out; he pushed aside Khalid's gauntlet, and walked resolutely forward, ahead of the group. Dripping badly.

"You should try and walk more to the right, wizard," Jaheira instructed; his path changed slightly, but he continued to lead in bitter silence.

—

"And halt! You're under arrest for banditry and highway robbery!"

Well-shined plate glinted under the eleventh-hour sun and a closed-faced, red-insignia'd helm. The mud covering Xzar had solidified into light-coloured flakes slowly scraping away from him. The lone Flaming Fist held a longbow drawn tautly in their direction, the few segments it was possible to see of his face unmoving.

"We are—"

"We're not bandits," Prudence said over Jaheira's voice.

"You skulk in the wilderness instead of the main roads," he said—and it would have made an atrociously smug textbook homily on openness, Prudence briefly reflected, that when they failed to take the main road on the grounds of practicality of _course_ a paladin would be mistaken for a bandit— "Surrender to the Flaming Fist!"

"The bandits are supposed to be humans and hobgoblins, aren't they?" Prudence said; argumentum ad group dynamics. "We're only adventurers, bound to investigate Nashkel..."

"They'd all say that," the Fist retorted. "Give yourselves up now...or you can be sure there'll be trouble."

There were other glints of bright armour between the trees, of course; Prudence was sure that at the least Jaheira and Montaron knew it (probably before her). Nobody was fool enough...

"If there were bandits who outnumbered a Flaming Fist sixfold, wouldn't they have already attacked?" she said; framed it as a pure hypothetical. Jaheira's head seemed to turn slightly to her direction, and fortunately, the Fist's bow wavered. "For his...highly polished iron." She wasn't fond of flattery. "We did encounter two ogrillions not far north; and delivered a waylaid letter to Mirianne of Beregost from her husband. Do you patrol near there often?" Likely enough; Beregost was tied closely to the Gate, the Fist's base of operations.

"Yes, he does," said the Flaming Fist closest to him, stalking openly out of the trees wearing the insignia of a lieutenant, his bow also drawn; "Let these folk pass, Arcen. I'm acquainted with Mistress Mirianne and her man Rodolf these past—"

"Roe," Prudence said; and there wasn't a chance that these Flaming Fists were not what they seemed, either—no; easier for them to risk an attack than to reveal a second man—

"Roe, these past twelve years. Tymora keep him if he's taken it into his head to travel back this season." The lieutenant seemed to smile; he'd a weathered, tanned face, thick-jawed and black-stubbled. "Doubt I need to warn you of much more, travellers. Try not to be mistaken for what ye might have been."

"Yeah, ye can shove it up yer..." Montaron muttered under his breath, one of his scowls fixedly set.

"Thanks for the thought," Prudence said, addressing the leading Fist. "And your name, sir?"

"Officer Ferren. Move on, men!"

"If that is the standard of the Fist's recruits," Jaheira said almost primly, marching onward; "then 'tis small wonder they find the roads so plagued." They travelled on no road but rougher trails between the trees; a bearlike growl sounded some distance away.

"Usual standard of the stinking lot of 'em," Montaron said. "Go wrap your mouth over yer stick, druid, I'm liking the quiet for damn once." Xzar had not ended his silent, fixed sulking; Prudence saw the mage rub grimly again at the dried dirt at his left ear.

"D-do not talk to m-my—"

"Thank you, Khalid, but 'tis no need," Jaheira said. "Honour your own precept, halfling. Ground tongue makes excellent fertiliser, especially with the kind of filth you're spewing."

"And ground druid be extra valuable to the soil, eh?—"

"That's quite enough!" Prudence said. Death threat from Montaron, mutilation threat from Jaheira. "How badly do you want to solve this problem of Nashkel, Montaron?"

"Badly enough, for these purposes—" It was Xzar who replied, turning back and speaking again; "A dagger against someone else isn't one that finds its way to you, Monty, haven't you said so?" Not a very positive characterisation of the group's usefulness.

"I prefer to work alone." Montaron's scowl again compared to Jaheira's was approximately equal in expressiveness. "Ye'll learn it's unwise to test my patience."

"As you test mine," Jaheira said regally.

"I hate to state the obvious, but this _isn't helping_ ," Prudence said. "I'd almost suggest, go march on opposite sides of the group; but you're too experienced and practical to need to..."

"Child, you're right that it is far from your place to meddle with what you fail to—" Jaheira said.

Montaron, simultaneously; "Think ye can make us play nice-nice? I've suffered yer company about as long as I'm going to!"

Well. That had worked, in a way. She waited for Khalid's words; "C-come now, dear. No point in this s-sort of thing."

Jaheira walked again to the front, setting the pace and the route; Khalid behind her, Imoen next. A close grove of pines; Prudence watched the scenery. She would have thought that the Watchers' regular drills and marches should have well prepared her for the adventurer's trek through the forest; but there was more to carry on one's back in this circumstance, even though she'd tried to pack for utility. At any rate, they should be slowly nearing the Amnian border, a land she'd never travelled to before.

"We're delayed. We need to get to Nashkel." Xzar's muddied face drew next to her. "It's all your fault. Rescuing kittens and delivering the post and all that. Why bother with these petty things?"

"Don't pretend you don't understand why," she said.

"Well, you don't know the lady _wanted_ to hear from her husband again. She managed to send him far, far away from her in the first place."

"You heard her, Xzar."

"True; and you could have provoked the same illusion of temporary happiness if you had known enough to forge the document."

"Happiness isn't itself an illusion, however temporary. And that, of course, would be wrong."

"A courageous anti-forgery position! I won't feign surprise." He sharply brushed back a section of tangled hair from his face. "Such indiscriminate deeds; of what strange substance do you conjure them?"

"It's a good life that's conjured of good deeds," she half-quoted in return.

Xzar shook his head. "You know, it's that sort of comment that makes Montaron keep saying you're going to die quickly."

"He says the same thing about you," Prudence observed. About everyone, really. She spoke quietly, still watching the area; beyond birdsong nearby, there seemed nothing immediately afoot.

"...Monty's overly pessimistic." Xzar waved away such speculations, gesturing through the air and flaking dust to settle on her forest-stained mail. "The beneficent time is one spent to understand life—which is to say, the knowledge of the leaving of it. The likes of the lady Mirianne will make no intriguing discovery."

"You can't be sure of that," Prudence said. "Take note of her example, because—it worked out." Bringing her husband's letter had been the right thing to do; and would have been even if she had not rewarded them.

"Do not take examples as a whole—the note could have been one of those poisoned ones where the ink rubs deadly; or its recipient a falsehood," Xzar said.

"It wasn't. Examples are evidence; find sufficient of them and one has proof. This one counts."

"Very smug of you."

"—Smugness I'd deny. Not that my reasons—why do you make this journey to Nashkel's _petty_ problems?" she said; —mercenary reasons, it seemed, but even a paladin did not usually refuse a reward from those who could spare it.

"The same reasons of personal duty that _everyone_ else here would claim," he said, smiling; "—because a travelling mage might find interesting new spells—because the killer rabbits will win if I don't? I don't think we'll be killed if not, but you should never trust dragons with feet like rabbits; or banshees—I have divined tales of banshees." He spoke no longer of the purpose for which he worked, but spun quickly into his account, speaking with gesture as much as voice; "In the furthest south of Toril, they say there are lands of ice and snow like the north, but with no people in its reaches and valleys, nor any creatures; if there you search for the floor of a cave cut into a black hexagon—or improvise with suitable components—and stand at the very centre at it for as long as a night where there is no day, you will hear the howl of the abandoned banshee from that which once lived there. Poor men will be given the iron keys to the dead silver city one hundred and thirty-two feet below the ice; mad men made sane; rich men will have tongues taken out by the roots and eaten in saltwater; —and nobody knows what happens to sane men. They are rarer than one supposes."

Another sudden change of subject; fascinating—Prudence had herself read geographical treatises theorising of continents even further south than Maztica and Lapongo, likely as frozen as the northern lands out of Toril's symmetry, perhaps even inhabited. She wanted to see such places, someday, if within her duties. "You came from north of here; have you travelled to—"

"Almost went to Candlekeep once, I believe; not further south—one gets out so rarely when one is embroiled in the study of magic. In any case," he continued rather quickly, "I was busy nagging you in most vociferous terms that we have to get to Nashkel soon; our delay is making me rather tense. I'm not nice when I'm tense." He continued to move his hands through complicated patterns; during his loretelling he had plucked a leaf from a tree with a cantrip, and glowing an icy blue it circled each of his wrists in turn.

"Is anyone?" she said lightly. _Nice_ was an adjective she would never have considered applying to Xzar, in any case; 'surprisingly lucid at times', perhaps, or 'creative', or 'unconventionally rather clever'.

He shook his head fiercely, thereby scattering more dust from his misadventure. "You have to be," he said. "And if you're not I'm telling Helm on you, so there." He even stuck out his tongue.

She laughed; someone who gave long discourses on banshees in the southern continent one moment and was so juvenile the next— "Somehow I haven't met many gods who care about mild impatience. Actually I haven't met any gods in person, but..."

"Your nasty tense not-niceness promotes poor precedent, paladin. Ooh, alliteration," he added in aside. "One day you're tense, you start making excuses for yourself, you build up a little habit, and next day you explode in a fit of temper and kill cute little orc babies. Then it's Blackguardism and free rabbits for all."

"I'm not going to kill—where do you _get_ your ideas? And," she finished, "you said you were tense. I'm simply...mildly amused, at present. At you."

"Don't I make you tense? People are supposed to be tense around necromancy. A few quiet conversations about hobgoblin fingernails as a distinctly inferior reagent vis-a-vis acidic constructions and—"

"Necromancy's only an illegal practice in nations where all spellcasting is restricted," Prudence said. They might have already crossed the Amnian border by now, but the frontier towns such as Nashkel looked more kindly upon mages than the large cities. "If you'd complain of professional stigma, talk to Imoen... Not that I disagree with property law, of course."

"All a grand illusion," Xzar said serenely. "Gold is the uninteresting kind of dead and takes on only the symbolism that people raise it up to be; such notions are a phantom and formless void, a shapeless function and fragile pretence. A convenient lie they tell each other that a few bits of metal that are worth twenty vital components; only the Weave that casts the results is real. Demolish that, I should say; one shouldn't believe that illusion of owning when only what you think and do are real; and extend that to the fictioned laws that always pretend application beyond their factual scope, because if none believed in such they would no longer exist—"

She'd just heard one of the explanations for why Montaron carried coin, Prudence thought. "They tried that in that part of Tethyr after the civil war, didn't they?" she said. "A free state of neither property nor law."

"And again you drag matters to the mundane. Do you object to kicking and screaming?"

"Yes. The Kolkhozia worked for a while, on a small scale." She'd read of the Tethyr rebellion, not only about its battles; the changing governance had interested her. "They'd a good idea, I think. That people can share everything they truly need between them and through cooperation no longer need law. But then Iimerandi and his soldiers took over."

"And purged everyone and danced on the remains and built secret enforcement guard companies and all that," Xzar finished. "Thereby serving as another single example; and by no means proof that law is not a collective illusion—"

"You're being deliberately contrary," she answered back, "illusion isn't the word I'd use for social institutions, but Tethyr is an example that groups over a certain size need law to function—"

Jaheira, suddenly, turned back, something like anger in her face; "Enough of that! That grave time is not for you to make light of in your foolishness—"

"Sorry," Prudence said, "I didn't intend to treat those tragedies lightly—"

Jaheira said a few words to herself, in which the phrase 'foolish child' seemed to be distinguishable, and turned again to lead on with a particularly forbidding set to her back.

—

Six birds burst out of the trees above Imoen's head; she startled, stepping back and watching them take flight, and Montaron had already grasped his crossbow. He shot neatly and quickly; one pigeon fell dead before him.

"Something disturbed them—not you, Imoen, though you could learn to move with a more natural discretion—" Jaheira said; Prudence stepped next to her sister, loosening the pack's straps on her own shoulders, ready to drop it if need be.

"Do you s-see much?" Khalid said. Daylight remained; it was the eighteenth hour or so, Prudence estimated, Nashkel's road to the west of them by Jaheira's reckoning and the town itself yet some hours away.

"I believe I feel something in the forest that should not be. If the rumoured bandits indeed," Jaheira said, her face set like stone, "then you know what we must do."

 _For the sake of other travellers—if they really_ are _bandits, if we're justified_ — Prudence thought, feeling suddenly nervous; they themselves had been mistaken for such—

She could hear the sound of the winds in the trees. Montaron looked down at the fallen bird for an instant, and held his crossbow still ready; Prudence shrugged off her pack, nudging it with her foot into the cover of a bush, laying hands on her own ranged weapon. Imoen held an arrow in her right hand.

 _I pray for protection—_ Prudence whispered, and touched Imoen's shoulder briefly; pale blue light flashed into her sister's body, a small gesture of defence against evil. Likely her casting would not be long sustained; but—

Jaheira nodded to herself. "Humans," she said. In the direction she looked, one could conjure up shadows in one's sight, perhaps, or translate slight noise into the sounds of something coming; but still Prudence heard nothing—no, _that_ sound was close to human movement; and that from the left perhaps a voice near them, as the group stood in relative coverage, between tall trees—

Then the first arrow pierced past them and she heard Xzar's scream. Not bleeding, as far as she saw; pinned to the tree behind him, arrow near his arm and through the sleeve of his robes—Montaron leaned forward, slashed with his shortsword—Imoen ducked down—

A shape, something, perhaps sixty yards away; Prudence loosed a bolt in its rough direction—she did not think of the steps of the action, the motion practised enough, simple worry flashing through her mind. Three more arrows came to them, one blurring inches above her head, Jaheira charging out. Her own aim did not seem to have made true; then sound, a man's voice—

"We've you surrounded! Drop your weapons—"

Had to be a lie, that; couldn't be more Fist, they'd have announced— There she could see the shape in the woods that had spoken, more of a target; Prudence thought she had the shot lined at last, aimed the bolt and heard a cry.

"Ye can stay," she heard Montaron saying; saw him running into the shadows behind Khalid, taking the left flank. Imoen was down behind a trunk, loosing an arrow of her own; Prudence reloaded the crossbow and launched again in the direction of what she could see.

Arrows returned on them. She dropped flat on the ground; a projectile whistled above where her head had been—enemy's aim close to them—

"And then, after Mister Tree began to move, it's so cold and the crows came to rest on the black towers and the gutters fell and then there was a griffin in the shape of a hungry jackal—" Xzar's eyes seemed to stare in their direction, but he looked past her and Imoen as if he could see neither of them; fallen to the ground, one hand clutched over where Montaron had bared loose his arm, freeing his robes from the arrow. An odd pale blue taint on his skin. As long as he and Imoen stayed down—

Prudence raised her shield, drew herself up; she'd seen a second figure in motion, a man in dark mail, carrying a large bow. She saw the string release, the arrow toward her, but her shield was ready— She felt first the impact, then a strange cold on the inside of the metal, rimed by thin and new-formed ice. _Enchanted arrows—the tale of them—_ Imoen shot quickly in reprisal; the man had raised his own shield, but Imoen's aim was true enough—Prudence, briefly resting her shield, reloading her own weapon, saw the arrow meet his shoulder, on the left. He seemed to stumble, but Imoen's attack hadn't penetrated through his scalemail; and he drew his sword, running to attack. His wide shield was enough against the bolt she released.

The bandit was upon them; Imoen scrambled out of the way of his sword, and Prudence had her own blade drawn. He expected her move, it seemed—moved his shield easily to block, while his sword sought her head in a strike that seemed formidable enough to decapitate—

She moved under the shape of his blow, turning the action into an attack at his legs, not so well-protected by his mail (as her own—but she could move quickly; she evaded him).

"Get back!" she told her sister, and Xzar if he listened, who whispered something cold and eerie now, looking down at the ground. Imoen scuttled back almost like a crab, about to ready her bow again. The man Prudence fought—she could smell him, at this distance, oiled mail and sweated cloth and leather, leaves and mould—he was a few inches shorter than her, thick-built, and when their blades met she thought for an instant that she saw another's face on him, the man called Shank—

A second man; near Imoen—of course the man in black armour had expected a comrade—it was horrible strategy to place oneself between two, and this was no training but the reality; but obviously— She moved between them; tried to distract the second by her blade, use her shield against the other. Imoen had moved back, though her bow was under the foot of the second bandit. Leathers, rather than the mail of the other; the longsword he swung was chipped and stained. Hardly time to think; there was fear for her sister in her, and the simple reflex to keep fighting.

Two pines, close together, surrounded them; a branch was at Prudence's back, pressed by her shoulders. Likely enough to get herself killed; both men moved in. The second man was slow, but the first— Had to get him out of the way, the trained impulse came to her; needed to be quick about it—

She slid to the side and down, away from the second man; and the branch swung back into the first's face. Her low slash was as fast as she could attempt, to his right side, below his raised blade; she cut into his mail where it joined, but he came again at her. He bled. That was a motion she recognised from his longsword, a swift thrust in seconde—yet with his movement conserved as it ought to be, his shield still ready—

She hadn't given way to fear, or lost control; she saw the details before her, knew where her feet stood on a mound of higher ground, and what in that moment seemed had to be done. Prudence turned to meet the attack with the edge of her shield; raised it and his sword—her reach would have to be sufficient, let him begin to move as if to block a low riposte. Instead her blade went up, as fast a movement as she could; a weakness at his neck, between termination of armour and neck of helm. She was just tall enough for it to be a strike from above, and the weight of her blade carried it through. The throat cut, jugularis, karotides vessel, against her will her mind leaping to the words—he was down, dying. More by fortune than by skill. It had taken but a few seconds of time.

There was the second man. He couldn't ignore her in favour of Imoen. He was much bigger than her sister, taller than the armoured man had been. The jerking path of his sword was almost as if he thought it a club, unpredictable and novicelike. It flashed through her mind that it was better to be cautious with an opponent like this, the very unpredictability could be enough to decide the fight in his favour; but Prudence fended away a mad strike from him, pushed closer; and against him alone she would likely win—

"Ye killed Charilan," he spoke. He seemed of Imoen's age, despite his bulk.

"You could surrender," she replied, because one had to say it; she had killed his companion, and perhaps she herself would not have—. He did not reply but gave another of those strong but slow blows, and she moved easily aside from it. You didn't drag out a fight; he did not seem to know it, perhaps relying on his broader shoulders, but she was close to finishing. He left the right side of his torso open, and he would not move fast enough to protect himself.

Then a single, high word sounded behind her; Xzar's voice. Like a frightened rabbit the bandit instantly turned and ran from her as fast as a deer, his face white as a sheet, almost tripping over Imoen in his hurried flight. It had happened almost too quickly to do anything; their attacker was gone between the trees, and there was only the other man there. Dead already, still and quiet; Prudence saw the blood about him on the forest floor, and looked away. People were fragile, bodies were fragile, she'd learned in theory in the course of her studies, felt it here... Xzar had raised himself to sit on his haunches, still clutching his blue-tinged arm, silently watching.

"Imoen?" Her sister was already bending down to reclaim her bow. Imoen was unhurt; as for the others—

"That was a horror?" Prudence interrogated Xzar; they should go quickly, move on and help.

"A wide-area effect; cast from one's own fear—I hate being so cold—it ought to have spread far—" He sounded relatively lucid, speaking calmly as if lecturing on theoretical magic; she should heal his arm, when they could.

"Fool wizard!" Montaron's voice called; near him were Khalid and Jaheira, Jaheira's skin a thick dark brown of a druid's protective casting. She held her quarterstaff grimly ready. Montaron carried a jagged half of a broken shortsword in one hand, and a long dagger in the other. "Ye drove them away whilst we were near-done."

"By my witness, two escaped free." Jaheira looked briefly across at the dead man.

"I stuck the one the knightling pegged, saw ye and yer man dispatch the other two," Montaron said. He stared darkly at Xzar. "If ye'd but stayed silent a moment longer, I'd have sent the last down, fleeing or no. Missed a bolt through him by an inch at that."

"She must have killed the Talon, while I was...busy," Xzar said, releasing his left arm for a second in order to point at the body. "Then I think there was another. I can't move my hand, Monty, it's so cold. I couldn't cast anything else; I'd like healing."

Talons, Black Talons—that would fit the dark armour and insignia, Prudence thought; she'd read of them as a northern mercenary company, known for ruthlessness. She bent down next to Xzar. His forearm was cold as ice, frozen solid by the arrow's mark; she tried to think swiftly how to deal with that.

"And it was an act spurring the bandits to flee to seek aid from their fellows," Jaheira said.

"Yeah, even the druid—" Montaron said, and briefly snarled. "Get on yer way again, mage."

"Indeed," Jaheira said, her tones low and disapproving, as if highly reluctant to agree with Montaron, however briefly. "It would do no good to us if they returned with reinforcements; and this is not our true purpose here." She was right, Prudence thought; one task at a time—

Enchanted arrows; the cold was an arcane effect. She'd read treatises on the type of injury. Prudence hastily stripped off her glove for added precision in the casting; she could sense the damage spread through each layer of the arm, suspended at the moment of the arrow's trauma. What blood there was formed reddened crystals over the skin. No wonder he claimed to be unable to move the hand; and a lack of circulation caused dire consequences in but a short time. Yet there was warm blood near enough to it, a gradual transition between healthy and blocked. She would start there and try to restrain the casting to a gradual path, for warming a part not capable of receiving renewed blood would be pointless. Even the person attached to the injury receded into obscurity; the challenge of the wound new to her experience occupied her thought.

"What do you k-know of Black Talons?" Khalid spoke; Prudence heard Montaron grunt as she began the prayer.

"Reckon what Xzar knows be the same as ye, except for the bats in his belfry that might have 'em tea-partying with crows or somesuch. Now what did this bright boy have on himself?" The sound of cloth and leather tearing; out of the corner of her eye Prudence could see Montaron examining the Talon's possessions. She felt warmth gradually channelled through her, the healing mercifully granted; the true heat had to come not from the casting but the body returning to its usual state, fresh blood from the main brachial vessel where it branched into radial and ulnar, winding down the flesh and restoring it to life, moving away the old blood through softer veins. The detail of what she intended to do travelled through her mind's eye, and her focus held. She felt the healing end correctly. She stood again; in the minutiae of the casting she'd not thought of the man she had killed. She noticed that she was breathing harshly, though she had not thought of any tiredness while fighting. That had probably been the last healing she'd have the strength to cast, until she could quietly pray and rest.

"No volunteers to carry the armour? Yer own loss. Gold, halfway decent dagger—pox on the iron crisis—three arrows for ye, girl." Imoen carefully and quietly took what Montaron gave her, placing them within her quiver. "Should've shot the runaway; ye had a chance, didn't you?"

"Shoot someone in the back? I don't think so—" Imoen said.

"Ye learn or ye die; 'tis yer funeral." Montaron was ready to go; Prudence reached for her own pack. She could see the utility of not remaining here in case of a renewed attack, perhaps in revenge; but still it felt wrong to leave dead people like this.

"Jaheira? Could you do the same casting for the spiders, to at least...bury these people?" Prudence said.

"It would certainly prevent any possibility of raising," Jaheira said; Prudence wanted to correct her, to say that denying the men any slight chances of life certainly hadn't been her intent, but... "'Tis a rough method. The ground is much more dry here, so the disturbance to the earth will be great," Jaheira continued. "Once you are well out of the way I shall cast, and then return to you."

Jaheira had begun her chant; Prudence marched on with the others. The earth unevenly shook below her feet, and sunset and approaching shadows came. The barkskinned Jaheira had returned to the lead. They moved quietly enough, until darkness began to cause the humans to stumble; even Imoen.

"All right?" Prudence asked her quietly. They had to have covered some fair distance.

"I will be, I think," Imoen said. "Closer than that other guy; not so bad as I thought, maybe." Prudence saw her shrug in the darkness, crossing nimbly across a well-grown root. "Was there more I should've done? Maybe tried to shoot when that man ran?"

He was a bandit; likely enough he'd attack others; and yet trying to kill someone running in fear felt wrong, and was by some laws of chivalry... "You shouldn't have to," Prudence said. If Imoen had not aimed her bow, then she herself had failed to take up her crossbow in time. _Circumstances in which that..._

"Fine." Imoen half-smiled in the dark.

"A stream not far," Jaheira said. "I hear you three fumbling in the back. There exist humans capable of mastering something of a ranger's respect."

"Blame the man in the dress and Dame Clanky Armour over here, not me," Imoen said, cheerily enough; she jumped neatly on a thick fallen branch, walking it as if it were a tightrope.

"Robes. And pants," Xzar corrected, to which Montaron appended a note of gratitude. "Graveyards are better at night," he said. "It's easier to see the ectoplasm coming." He didn't have the same easy balance as the half-elves or Montaron, but he moved quickly, Prudence thought; flighty in his odd whims, but precise.

A long day; they ought to rest, if it were safe. She'd almost want to face ten hobgoblins alone in a quick battle rather than march out the night.

"I know well enough where we are. And I do not intend to continue to tramp about as if pushed by a slave-driver," Jaheira said, and Prudence thought there was almost a trace of humour in her voice.

Clear water nearby; a defensible position near a small hill; and Jaheira's advice that a fire would be acceptable.

"Spices," Imoen said suddenly, at Khalid's elbow; "you said you have some?"

"Old recipes," Khalid said gently, "from m-my homeland; useful on the trail."

"That's nice—" It was good, Prudence thought, to see Imoen taking an interest in talking to Khalid of details of roasting the bird Montaron had killed. She herself was capable of cooking, and further capable of living upon what she could cook; but Imoen put the claim that most of what Prudence set her hand to inevitably drifted toward the taste and consistency of plain porridge. Hence the labour division of washing up.

She ran through the familiar phrasings of a prayer in her mind; the small fire's light was not enough to read by. She'd gone from Candlekeep's vast library to but a tattered, simple book of devotionals, the only tome she had brought away, and one she had half-memorised already through use. _Where there is doubt, let there be faith. Where there is darkness, let there be light. Where there is death_...

Montaron had been the one to kill the man at the inn, and she had hardly objected. This was the second human she'd mortally wounded herself; it felt different to hobgoblin or ogrillion. She had to feel some manner of regret over taking a sapient life. There was little guilt in her over this death, her prayers of relief that Imoen and the others remained unhurt seeming to be accepted. And still it was no easy matter; and if it became so that would be far worse a concern; and yet of course she could not complain of it, especially if others killed to defend her. Khalid and Jaheira, like her father, had faced far more.

Jaheira, her complexion once more its usual light brown, drew a rag across her quarterstaff. Prudence joined her, similarly paying attention to her own weapon; improperly kept arms would kill one in battle. There was blood she had not before noticed on her chainmail, not her own.

"Where were you from, originally, Jaheira?" Prudence asked casually; she wished she'd more aptitude for languages, but by accent she couldn't place Jaheira anywhere more precise than some distance away from the Sword Coast. Nor did she speak like her husband, from Calimshan.

"A druid grove." Jaheira efficiently twisted her cloth about the staff, cleaning and readying it for its next use. "The enclave raised me from a young child. 'Twas in Tethyr," she added, seeming to glare as she spoke; "My family by blood did not escape the mobs within the country."

Small wonder she objected to the country's usage. "Are you still with a group of druids?"

"I felt it best to leave, once I had grown. I am enabled to take a more active part in the protection of nature," Jaheira said. "Your father was a good man in our cause. I expect that whomever was responsible for his death will suffer an equal fate." The tone of her voice was quiet, relative to her usual speech; but it was impossible to doubt her fierceness.

"If they...continue to conveniently leave clues of what happened," Prudence said. Such as bounties with written descriptions of target and reward. It wasn't possible to follow where the armoured man had gone, on that night; the only chance was if he continued to seek her, or if she heard a tale of the location of powerful warriors with strange, bright eyes. The former she feared, however much she ought to conquer that; perhaps let it be the latter, for the man was a murderer.

"Yes, I gathered that you discovered no trail," Jaheira said, placing emphasis on the second pronoun and her tone disapproving once more; and Prudence could not dispute her rightness.

—

Her watch, and a waterlogged thing seemingly shapeless in the darkness dripped its way near, quivering like a damp bowstring, a trail of moisture falling from it like a kraken's dark reach.

An excuse to stop the exercise she was pushing herself through, staring into the darkness around throughout. Her arms screamed for a rest; she lowered her blade. "No fish ate you, then, Xzar?"

He shivered, and sat himself carefully near the still-warm embers. " _Clean._ " He hissed, running a hand through soaked hair. "Nobody looked?"

"Probably much against a paladin's code," she replied. Archaic and thoroughly outdated treatises, usually titled along the lines of _Upon The Hygienic Conduct of the Young Gentleman_ , with a plethora of complex botanical metaphors and dire admonitions against looking at or thinking about anything female. She sat near him, sprawled into a comfortable posture that such volumes would have condemned for the young gentlewoman.

"Considerate as the sea monsters." Xzar stared at a point six inches behind her left ear. "Can one use the concept of the infinite mirror in the transmutation of water?" he said, probably not to her at all, though quietly enough that it did not endanger the group. "Endless light—sunfire spell, very powerful and not relevant—reflected substance; the casting component is sympathetic manipulation, silver mirror or fish-scale might suffice, drop against drop in the alchemic effects..."

He continued the soft, animated conversation with enthusiasm; it was beyond Prudence's studies, a technical discussion on transmutation spells. A distraction for her to try and halfway decipher the theories he attempted to defend; she kept her eyes open, watching the forest around them. He ought to rest, once he was a little drier. It was difficult not to think that Xzar needed some degree of Looking After.

"And so a small whip of water—conjuration side effect, they say transmutation cannot inherently multiply matter that cannot multiply itself, it would be as if you raised your head with your own steam without summoning it yourself—but if you change it, you can always change it, the Weave reaches everywhere, transmute across space as well as time; the second path then a quarter of a turn, pretend not to be doing what you're doing if it's impossible— That's very helpful, you're dismissed," Xzar said to the non-existent entity. "How many possibilities are there to water-summoning in a fight? It's not always easy to tell when one is shot by icy arrows."

Her mind raced to chances before she could stop herself, whether it was her or some other entity he meant to ask. Strategy was an excuse. "Fire creatures, for the obvious—I'd think of salamanders, mephits. Weaken the earth under an opponent if suitable terrain. If insufficient mass for strong impact in itself, the pull of the earth or the energy of movement could turn it to either shield or weapon. It would have a flexibility advantage there. Heat it to boiling, as in siege warfare. Hold it around someone or something's head if they need to breathe, though that's too slow and wrong..." She stopped herself. "Sorry. I shouldn't be morbid." There were few she could win against on muscled strength alone; the strategic treatises she read focused on thoughts of innovation, trying to use circumstances to advantage. Such as the dishonourable trick of sweeping branches, or the unpleasant thought of asking a mage to drown people.

"Is there a meaning to your tattoos?" she asked instead.

Xzar seemed to half-laugh, and continued to speak quietly in the darkness; "Never. I wanted something utterly meaningless. It would be a—an insane Loviatan to try again—a lot of needles—" So one could imagine; they crossed his face in tangled, symmetrical lines, and even on his upper arm below his robes there was a trace of black ink. "But everything's echoed in the Weave somewhere—always unpredictable and following universal—" He nodded sagely, and she couldn't disagree in so many words. "Scar on the left of your face, warrior?"

"Lost a fight to a quintain years ago," Prudence admitted; mundane and less than impressive.

"Needs more bears and gold to the tale. And, what, no cruelly heartwarming moral to warm the cockles?"

"Would you pine for a thing so ill-timbered?" Her sense of humour...degenerated, upon occasion.

"That's awful," he denounced. The call of a bird echoed loudly from the trees nearby, and silenced them; Prudence narrowed her eyes, staring in the direction from where the cry had come, searching for any signs of hostility. The last attack while they had attempted to rest had been quite enough for her tastes.

"Spiders have eyes..." Xzar whispered. He held something small and dark, and chanted. It flew into the air, a few stray viridescent spots glittering on its surface; and then the spider's separated eye opened, shining an unnatural green instead of its expected black. It bobbed once in front of them, and then flew to the trees beyond.

"I could _read_ with this." Xzar's own eyes were closed, and he whispered another arcane phrase. "Oh, hello, it's an owl. Please don't eat the spell components. Go find a preying rabbit with dragon feet. Trees closing in, stream, insects with chitinous eyes. No—" He raised a hand to his forehead, as though in pain. "The spell mars; diagnosis of local fauna negligible. Consummatum est."

"That was a wizard eye?" Prudence guessed.

"I don't know that divination," Xzar said in rather sulky tones. "The eyes were in a praesine solution to bind the essential properties, half an enchanter's link to see from them, duration disturbingly limited—" A clever improvisation from him, then. "But you're dead to the Weave," he accused. "Unobservant. None of your casting leaks into other domains and you walk through leylines without shifting. Thus your idle curiosity is puzzling."

Her studies on magic had a 'how-to-defeat' objective. "I wasn't always cut off. My father taught me a little of his craft, but I lost that after—well, the obvious." She and Imoen had both fallen away from Gorion's field of study; it was just that her severing was more complete.

"Then they took it from you. That's the worst thing I've ever heard." Xzar shook his head. "No, it's really not. But—you'd _magic_ , and let it be sealed away? Choose to give away that power?" His voice rose in mad, shocked excitement. "That's bad—nobody should allow it—"

"Talk so loudly and I don't doubt Jaheira will overhear—" And whatever she said would be much deserved in her case, Prudence reprimanded herself; and yet she replied to him. "He who gets his arm halfway bitten off by gibberlings complains that a sword's inadequate? And you know what they say about those who crave raw power."

"That they're rational people who understand what happens if they don't? No—two, three—a case different, utility of armour duly noted," he partly conceded. "Is it wholly for power to bedim noontide sun through tides of blackened smoke; call forth the mutinous winds of the planes; set roaring war 'twixt green sea and azured vault; give fire to rattling thunder; order graves to wake and let forth their sleepers?—" He spoke quickly, waving his hands to conjure the imagery of magic; from a well-known tale of a Chondathan wizard duke.

"That particular speaker drowned his book; a poor example. The purpose of gaining power makes a thing evil," she lectured. Obvious theology.

"For he abandoned the Art for rulership; 'tis nigh unendurable to study whilst dealing with large numbers of live people. One ought not to mix one's forms. Is the subtext of your inquiry _Do you intend to conquer Faerun with a thousand skeletons wrenched and reanimated from their graves, Xzar_?"

"I'd hope not." She suppressed the flippant thought that one thousand mindless undead lacked in military logistics. "Do I need to ask it?" He was far from as powerful a wizard as the likes of Ulraunt or Tethtoril, that was readily apparent, vulnerable in himself—

"No, I think that's one—I am no Red Wizard, for that confusion of temporal and true," Xzar said. "In fact power and the wish to know are one; that to understand the Weave and the secrets of the life's energy is man's chief end; that I seek and I care not what they call it." He spread his hands across his knees, raising his head as though in pride.

She had seen his enthusiasm on magic for its own sake. For now, that could be enough. _Man's chief end is to glorify the true gods and serve with honour forever—_

"I call it an improvement on fictions of world conquest."

"And there lies the heartwarming moral: that to shiver in darkness and see out of spider eyes must cause some sudden threat. Astral scorpions?"

"How tangible are astral scorpions?" she asked; and watched the forest darkness in case he meant some graver threat.

"It depends." Xzar paused. "Would you object to—no sudden movements? For the next minute or so?"

"For what reason?" Prudence said. Probably always important to ask that, in his strange banters that changed like threads flashing silver and sunlight on a loom, a thousand different patterns woven rapidly into each other.

"Astral scorpions," he repeated, as if it were obvious. "They do chase everyone, and you are here." Xzar raised a hand slowly; she had seen his dismay of others touching him, and chose to sit still. His fingers felt along the line of her jaw, as if brushing away something that only he could see. His hand was still a little damp, the fingertips lightly callused. Neither the hands of a warrior nor a sedentary scholar.

"Dark blue for a caster's signature, though the divine meddling axis changes the dimension, it's green for the druid. Uniform, it seems," he said. "But they say it always leaves a mark, livid and ripped, it doesn't matter the reason of commission. Sometimes truly impressive ones..."

She drew back. Of course it had to come to that; _the taking of any thinking life leaves always a stain_ — "Don't try to read," Prudence said roughly.

"But I haven't cast any divination spells on you!" Xzar protested. "Of course, I don't know so many, yet. I said 'impressive'; I cannot measure weapon skill, but 'twas a success in battle with one lying there..."

"Nothing like that should be impressive," she said coldly. The reasons for the Black Talon she thought sufficient, the reasons why a paladin carried a weapon. There were reasons less convincing for the man called Shank: bled out in the priest's hut while she went to seek others, though by duty she ought to have ensured him only subdued for the Watchers' judgement. By the grace of the gods that had been the case for Carbos; it should be done only under law or by dire need.

Xzar's hand dropped back to his side. "A step on the path," he said, "the art is less in love with the easeful than with subversion of it, but the ability for it will ever imprint; balance it as you choose, as yet I've no dreadful complaint."

Cryptic as usual. "It's Jaheira for balance," she replied. The trees were dark and still around them, and she kept to her watching of them.

"Between moving trees and cold fortresses," he said. "Tell oneself that there are no borders, like a story about dragons. Travel through that land and the border is gone; that the dark trees are taken and in the chests and changed to walk again..."

—

Gibberlings plagued them, on that last day of the journey; one of the diseased bands that roamed the Sword Coast, to Jaheira's voiced chagrin. Where the trees thinned, there was space enough for distance attacks, taking advantage of the creatures' massed movement for bolts and arrows to pierce through their crowd. Perhaps being attacked by monsters was becoming habit. For the mines, it would be wise to replenish her store of crossbow bolts. Thanks to the Friendly Arm, Imoen still carried far more arrows than she had run from Candlekeep with.

The town of Nashkel, at last, weathered wooden buildings, Amnian soldiers patrolling the few cobbled streets; and the woman at the inn they had needed to bury.

Two of them in the small store that morning of the mines, Montaron searching for a replacement sword, her bolts already purchased. Prudence turned over a set of brass knuckles, one of several similar instruments in a small box in a dark corner of Nashkel's store. A set with inch-long spikes rising from the rings, like claws-she could imagine the pain from a hit like that; and several sized for halfling or dwarf, thick and heavy. Prohibited in Candlekeep.

Montaron seemed to have finally chosen a shortsword he considered satisfactory.

"Few places don't have-special items for the discerning rogue," he said, prodding about this section of the establishment. "Thinkin' of one o' these, pally? Yer gloves weigh more than they look."

She'd stitched powdered lead into them; it served in defence as well as offence. "I'd rather proper gauntlets, to be honest."

"Depends on where you're expecting trouble," Montaron said. "Doesn't always happen when ye wear shiny armour. As ye ought to know by now, but some fools don't learn 'till they're dead."

"Two hundred. What kind of price is that?" she said quietly. For the second bounty notice she had warned the others of the update in the description of the company, and burned. _Implication: that there was another in the Friendly Arm; that a message of six passed faster than overland travel on foot..._

"Means ye shouldn't give yourself airs." He examined a concealed blade that slid out of a long black handle; "Fancy amateur stuff," he muttered, and returned it to its place. "Could take ye if I wanted, but it's not worth the while."

If he was going to be aggressive; "Care to test that? I wouldn't object to sparring." Montaron's skill she couldn't doubt; more experienced than she, practical and careful, and very good at hacking at kneecaps.

"Yeah, save it for the battlefield, kid." He scowled. "I've had about enough in here." It was a poor selection; the town suffered from the iron crisis. There had been a hauberk of overlapping metal scales that Prudence had thought seemed sturdy enough if a little heavy, sized for a human woman, but it was far beyond her funds. She left an extra coin on the shelf behind them; she had seen the storekeep watching them from his table, though not Montaron trying anything. There were soldiers from the garrison marching across the stone path through the centre of the town.

"Thought much of what that father of yours was up to?" he said. A reasonable inquiry.

"Retired to Candlekeep for years," Prudence said promptly. She'd implied as much before. "He'd have made his share of enemies when he adventured." As a Harper, at the least. Gorion had not liked to talk about his past, and she knew few specific details of his battles with slavers and other evildoers. Assailants had come after his ward before they had murdered him; and that condition she'd speculate on herself.

"A clean job, then, ye as well," Montaron said. "That sister of yours can't properly be your sister. Ye might both be humans, but there's scarce resemblance beyond it."

She had used to imagine points of likeness between herself and Gorion, attaining his height and conjuring a similarity to him in the lines of her chin; but with Imoen there was little to none, different in height and feature. That was good, for they could not be mistaken one for the other. "Not by blood. If she was also wanted, then I...I don't know what I'd do," she finished somewhat lamely. She'd have to-somehow get Imoen back to Candlekeep, probably by no means a paladin ought to consider to gain funds for the required tome; there was the triangular-merchantry scheme, the Phonzi Jansen trick, the soft kind of banditry practised in tales flashed through her mind despite any attempts to resist. But even Candlekeep was not safe; try to establish a tale that the corpse of a female attacker like the cleric belonged to Imoen? -Thanks to every god that existed that she did not have to face Imoen in that danger. "There are many people taking an interest in this crisis, aren't there?" she said carefully.

"It ain't that important. Die here and ye die a fool," Montaron said; and asked another question after the pause. "You, and those friends o' yer pa's. Happenstance, ye say?"

"He knew it brought his old friends to the general area." Also truth; there was no evidence that the iron crisis was in any way intertwined with the hurried flight from Candlekeep.

"And they brought ye," Montaron grunted.

"No; _you_ did," she said. "It seemed a worthy cause."

"And every day ye keep reminding me why I prefer to work alone." His eyes narrowed. "Suppose you aren't lying, as far as you know. More than one interested party, ye might say."

"No doubt," Prudence agreed smoothly. The Harpers did not wish to discuss the details of their interest.

He seemed to start suddenly, and glared up at her. "Enough out of you lest ye wake with a blade in your gullet."

"That's a bit unnecessary. Shall we see this through?" They were close to the mines, now; at the destination.

"Ye've adequate skill to keep from hindering me. Keep to that, and mayhaps you'll live longer."

—

 _Chondathan wizard duke_ —named Prospero, of course.


	4. Chapter 4

_In the night..._

Dark and quiet in the Nashkel Inn, those hours of rest. Along the two short lines of silent rooms, only one door showed the light of a flickering candle through the space between frame and the floor. Imoen's. Prudence had quietly knocked, slipping back into the small room; traces of gravedirt still lingered on her hands from the assassin's burial, though she had tried to scrub it away.

"Evenin'." Imoen seemed to be sharpening some sort of...metal object she held; small, sharp, and probably one of the devices she had inherited from Winthrop. Several more were laid out near her on the bed, spilling from a leather pouch.

"You're not tired?"

"Am, a little." Imoen stretched up her hands, briefly knotting and unknotting her fingers together. "The mines, tomorrow. We're really doing it, aren't we? And what're you going to do after? It's getting kind of really incredibly obvious the Harpers and the whatever-they-are don't want to be buddies, and they keep threatening to kill each other. You should've heard Monty and Jaheira going at it again after you left."

"They'll both likely have other concerns, once we're finished with the mines," Prudence said, and thought she had managed to sound confident about the adventure's outcome. If it was already time to talk about this, with Imoen...

Her sister frowned, the freckles on her face creasing together. "Do we keep going with Jaheira and Khalid, then? I like 'em...well, I like Khalid. Maybe Jaheira grows on you, like ferocious deer-eating moss or something."

"Jaheira's very good at what she does," Prudence said. "She's experience; she's every right to lead..."

"But you're almost as blockheaded as she is and you're about to suggest leaving them," Imoen said. She'd never been able to conceal anything from her sister for long, Prudence thought.

"It _is_ mostly my fault." Prudence sat in the room's single chair, backwards, her arms folded over its rickety back. Shouldn't have threatened to kill them when they'd met. "But they're Harpers, they're for balance—and that's not identical to my calling. The ideological difference's bound to show sometime."

"And the other two?" Imoen justly prodded.

"Montaron's pragmatic." If violent. "One can work with that. Xzar's...complicated."

"As in: necromancy's eww and he's blatantly crazy?" Imoen screwed up her face in a scowl as if she'd bitten into a lemon.

"Armour stinking of gibberling blood isn't much better and that's not his fault." Prudence could remember Gorion animating five tiny skeletal rats to dance across the floor whilst trying to instil magic's basic foundations into his wards; an invoker himself, he'd even tried to teach a cantrip or two from the necromantic school. Of course, gods' service and roguery had called to them instead.

"Right." Imoen took up her device again, and slowly sharpened another sliver of metal from it. "Don't think I haven't noticed you keep chatting. You can't fix him, y'know. Not even with the oh-I'm-ever-so-holy powers."

"I know," Prudence said. "I'm not that stupid."

Imoen sniffed in her most patronising manner, which produced a sound suggesting a very confused frog with a sore throat. "At least you're stuck with me to look after you. Montaron's a decentish thief, but proper rogues are supposed to bathe at least once in a while."

"I wouldn't assume that, Imoen," Prudence said, making a token moral effort to dissuade her sister from a life of thievery.

"Sorry, who's the rogue expert here? I've learnt a few tricks from him, but I think it's time to go on without those two." Imoen shaved a final spark from the device she held, examined it carefully, and began to return her tools to the pouch.

"I like them. But Xzar talked only of going to Nashkel. If that's what happens, then..." Her last sentence trailed off.

"Then good!" Imoen said. "And you really think we could get along without the others? Survive?"

The assassins; being held helplessly, being attacked. "Jaheira offered to help us find our place, if only for Gorion's sake—and that was generous of them. If we meet others, perhaps. They've fought red dragons, you heard them. Perhaps we'd only drag them down, instead of better learning to protect ourselves..."

Imoen beamed. "Hey, I was eavesdropping in the inn while you went out gravedigging with creepy necromancers. Heard of the Carnival coming up, quiet 'cause of the iron crisis—but might be some adventuring folk there. Blockheaded paladin and beautiful roguely young lady seek helpful adventurers who are definitely not trying to kill us or our friends, that sort of thing." She reached out to stroke the hem of the dark pink cloak slung to the edge of her bed. "I might miss Jaheira the Bossy, but I'd not mind getting out on our own, if we can."

"Thanks, Im," Prudence said. "I should ask—how uncomfortable are you with Xzar, going into the mines with him?" Imoen seemed uneasy at times with his stranger behaviour, but unintimidated.

Imoen spread out her hands, sitting back on the bed, and her light brown eyes seemed to take on a searching look. "I don't like the crazy. He's not done anything awful, but I never liked necromancy, and it gets creepy. He acts like he's seen too much weird stuff. Maybe it's a bit like the time I saw you do that spooky thing with your eyes. I really don't want to go on with him and Montaron. At least as crazycreepy necromancers go, I guess he's...kind of wimpy?"

That was—fair enough, Prudence supposed. Xzar had insight alongside his strangeness, his tangled speeches, and it interested her more than otherwise. But her sister was more important, if Imoen still felt strongly against it when they had to decide.

"Both you and he need to be careful," she reminded Imoen. "You're not carrying strong armour. Try to stay back."

"Aww, it's nice of you to lecture about it, Pruney, but I can really see why you and Jaheira don't feed off each other. Same kind of thick skull—"

"All right, Imoen." A yawn crept up in her throat. "I guess we'll both be useless down there if we don't rest."

The mines...

 _—_

They were monsters. They were not demons. They were worse. Above eighty days by his reckoning of each hour, reverieless, the useless occupation of his training betraying the endless time he was trapped in the underworld away from star or sun to mark the passing of days.

 _I will die here. I will die and it will be a welcomed release. No. That would be a mercy that fate will never provide. I will die separated from the sword and my spirit will linger desperately and futilely searching for it within this prison for eternity._

There were no dreams for him. Waking nightmares. The kobolds came to torment him, prodding his body away from any tatters of rest, scaled claws and jagged, painful blades. The skeletons and walking dead, bones risen, pacing the dark miasma, touching him with sharp bone at the orders of the Cyricist. The necromancer.

They had taken the eyes and the tongue of a small gnome before murdering him; feeding it, the body, piece by piece, to the kobolds, incomprehensible screaming that lasted cruelly longer than he would have imagined possible. The inevitable had come at last, for that—fortunate—soul. Whereas his own torturers denied him any pretence at blank oblivion.

The thick iron chains bound him to the dark earth; scraped his wrists bloody, severed him from sword and book. The blade was somewhere far from him, cut away, where perhaps the precious pages of his book of spells had been flung to the black tainted mud of the ground. He choked on the foul cloth thrust into his mouth, gagging him on mud and some oily substance. At times he shivered in the coldness of the wet mud always around him; and at times it burned like the hells themselves, when Mulahey lit fires for his vile sorcery. Scorches marked black patches across his skin and the soot soaked deeply into his throat.

The worst was when the demon came for him. When there was no reason beyond this torment that he ought to have been left to die like the gnome. The half-orc lived in a cavern of luxury where the foul smell of offal penetrated like the taint of polluted wine, where the thick Calimshite rugs hardly concealed the rotting waste below. A thin disguise for the maw of death it stood upon; much like all efforts of putting off failure and inescapable ending— Mulahey controlled countless skeletons and ghouls and his undead swarmed his quarters when he chose it, robbed from graves Xan knew not of what. Some were dead kobolds and human bones of recent slaughter; others yellowed, older and more terrible.

He would be thrown chained before the half-orc's thronelike seat. A crude display of dominance were it not so much of a nightmare that could not be dispelled. " _Little elf_ ," Mulahey taunted, and he gripped the tattered robes with talonlike nails. "Greycloak," he raved; "Do you think I do not know what you are?" The once-clean material, the symbol of his purpose, ripped easily away by the filthy hands. "The damned elf city. Twelve blue hills about the bloody place they call grey. Cursed pointy-ears point their noses to everything, as if Tazok's not bothered by you cursed gologs."

 _It is the twelve hills of the Shaeradim that surround the fair settlement, the Blueleaf trees growing azure and not yet extinct; the Greycloak Hills lie instead to the north of Evereska and are peaceful and quiet; the_ _half-orc is ignorant and..._

The number of days he had not seen his home and the days he had not seen the sun were mounting so high as to be almost united. He could not quite remember the crystal spires and balconies of Evereska, the dark restful trees and the sanctuaries. The city itself would pass as humans and beasts such as this invaded the lands. It was cruelty to so much attempt to think of it when it was gone forever from him even before its inevitable extinction.

"Not a measure of ore leaves these mines unspoiled. Tazok will never—hah, that know-nothing ogre. Can't read, can't haunt me here..." The residue of thick, dark smoke lurked in the Cyricist's quarters, about a glass pipe device of Calimshite design; a drug of some sort. He would blame it for the Cyricist's insanity, but there were so many other reasons. The dizzying perfume was below the other scents Mulahey flung about like sickly water, laid over the overwhelming stench of waste and death in a worthless attempt of disguise.

"Little elf," Mulahey repeated, "little wizard, thought you could outsmart me? Thought you could come down here, give me away to Tazok? Thought you could spell?"

Xan made no reply to the taunts; it would be pointless. Mulahey kicked at a table, and pages and quills fell to the ground, about the chains of his prisoner.

"Fine writing from weak gologs. Fine wizard thinks he's clever. Cleverer than Tazok. Cleverer than—that would be telling, wouldn't it?" The breath from Mulahey's yellow teeth was foul beyond belief. He shook his prisoner like a street dog worrying a rat in the lowest of human alleyways. "Write what I say like an elf would. Pretty writing to confound Tazok and the other, I will not give that away. Write only what I say."

His wrists were wounded and chained, his hands numb, the quill forced to his hand shaking. There was no temptation to scribe magic instead, to pen some mystical runes with the promise of escape. There was little he could have done anyway; his spells were blocked from him and his body wasted away with the loss of the moonblade. And Mulahey would know; Mulahey watched each stroke of ink with reddened, piglike eyes. There was an old story that orcs and the People had once been connected, but the orc race had been made as twisted as the drow, with brutality that equalled the most cunning of drow evils. This at least he believed. Mulahey stepped forward, his boot upon Xan's ankle, and the bones cracked and splintered.

"Write, little elf," Mulahey ordered. Bent to the floor, Xan found no choice. To resist his insane captor would result in worse; and then a healing, finally, to against his will return him from the very brink of annihilation. His hand shook. "J-h," Mulahey slowly spelled. "J-h-o-r-y-e-l, call him. The spore plagues flesh in the attic ripe as worms. You don't know what that means. Too clever for Tazok. The rats in the field in the east; then say _guojd_..."

Information; but in Xan's mind he could not seize it, shattered and slowly breaking in this doom. The code of words the half-orc used was beyond sanity, incoherent and rotten as the nature of this place. Even a few words that sounded as if they belonged to the vile tongue of the orcs, _skag_ , _thauk_ , _dhaub_. His letters were weak, blotted and shaking and frail on the parchment; and still better than the clumsy taloned hands of the half-orc. Any elf would have condemned it. He wrote as Mulahey demanded, lines of blood spilled on the parchment.

 _Scribe for me, little elf..._ the dark voice echoed. He would never wake from this nightmare.

 _—_

Something was different about her sister's appearance that morning. Prudence couldn't pin it further than that, and Imoen herself seemed cheerful. She'd challenged the village fool to a game of hide-and-seek, where he hid first, and therefore secured the release of his endless questions before Montaron or Jaheira could strongly react; and paced brightly along the way to the mines. Nashkel's fields yielded to barren ground, which would come to yield to buried, tainted iron.

"Imoen? Have you d-done something new with your hair, of late?" Khalid said.

"Indeed, Imoen. Is it some alteration in your clothing? The colour is loud, but I told you that it was not entirely unsuitable in material," Jaheira said, frowning.

"Oh, no. It's just me, little ol' Imoen." She giggled, shaking back her hair from her face, over the cowl of her cloak.

"Still th' same overly chirpy longshank." Montaron's pace kept steady, and he hardly looked at Imoen.

"This time I have the true spell to hand!" Xzar looked jubilantly in Prudence's direction. "Shall I divine the nature of the oddity?"

"Y' really don't need to." Imoen's tone of voice was suddenly uncomfortable, and one that Prudence knew very well. She looked more carefully at Imoen: her pack seemed approximately as full as the previous day, red hair twice-braided and otherwise loose about her chin, her only jewellery a simple necklace Winthrop had given her last winter solstice and the ring protecting her, her purple-dyed leathers and her cloak... It was a shade of dark pink much as usual for Imoen; she'd had her sister help her with the dying, many repeats of diluting the rose madder to proportion and steaming the material in the monks' vats. Looking more closely at the cloak: it seemed somehow different to the cloth from Candlekeep, a slightly more vivid colour, and it began to seem blurred to the eye if one began to focus upon it...

"Where did you get that cloak?" Prudence said.

"Found it? Lyin' around?" Imoen offered.

"It's magic," Xzar contributed. "Tell me I can cast the spell on it?"

" _Imoen_!" Prudence said, shocked. Wherever she had obtained it—wearing an unknown magical item! If it hurt Imoen in any way—

"It doesn't hurt people, I know that," Imoen said with scorn. "Mightn't have seen its enchantment at first glance, but I'm not stupid."

"Identify it, Xzar," Prudence said firmly. "Im, you _know_ you shouldn't—"

Montaron laughed. "What'd she get away with, mage?" he asked.

"In a minute." Xzar gestured into the air, and a white glow appeared before his eyes. He took up the hem of Imoen's cloak, and studied it carefully. "I see...strands of hair."

"That's kind of eww," Imoen muttered.

"Nymph hair," Xzar finished. "Distorts, deceives and illudes the eye and the ear; the bearer takes on the quality of the hirsute original. Not merely that, but the deliberate ability to enchant others to become your best friend—and a splendid permanency arrangement underneath."

"Oh, that sounds better than just _hair_ ," Imoen said. "I can live with glamorous nymph hair."

Xzar continued to speak, the white sparks of his spell still brightly active; "No, really, the permanency's the most fascinating part of it. Marvellously intricate—wind the caster's own magic as part of the cloth and make it parallel the Weave and sustain an independent existence. It really ought to be necromancy, this kind of wonderful spell. You make them by sacrificing a part of yourself; it's only because the mysterious conspiracy demands it that it's not formally classified under it. A small number of illusionists are capable of it, or so they say, I'd blame divine cheating for that; gnome gods and their bizarre prejudices. This example—so many threads, such a pattern; I'm not sure if I could do the untangling; sempiternal and braided and I see past it and into the one from whom it was made green grass and strawberry hair, yet how the weaving, how it was formed..." The spell faded, leaving his eyes green once more, and Imoen snatched the cloak back from him; but he said a few more words to himself on the complexities of the magery of it.

A powerful enchantment too expensive for them to buy. "Imoen, where did you get that?" Prudence said; this wasn't a simple inkwell. "You can't go around pickpocketing valuable magical objects—who did you steal it from?" she demanded, and Imoen answered.

"Fat guy at Feldepost's, his name was Algernon or Ambeyson or something. It's pink so I...Wearing it didn't do him any harm."

Not the cloaked, stout man she had noticed as incredibly handsome in that inn? "We have to return it to this Algernon," Prudence said. Of course Imoen had her knacks and her talents; it was clear and undoubted that she meant well and could achieve a lot with her abilities; but in the case of an object like this...

"Young lady, you shouldn't be wearing any garments whatsoever made out of nymph hair," Khalid said, with as stern articulation as if he were Winthrop or Gorion.

"It may be tainted by necromancy besides," Jaheira said, aiming another grim look in Xzar's direction.

"It's a magic cloak for adventuring! I'm an adventurer!" Imoen defended herself, twirling the pink cloak's right edge.

"Her skill fetched it," Montaron declared, actually backing her up. "How much of the take do I get for advice, kid?"

"None you can't filch from me, rogue." Imoen grinned.

"'Tis my own fault ye learned a few tricks."

"Heh, partway," Imoen said. "I'll be good with it now I know what it does, you know I will! And just think of all the unscrupulous deeds a bad person might've gotten up to, with a magic cloak like this."

Prudence couldn't restrain herself from the sarcasm; "Such as tempting others to deprive them of it?"

"Aww, that's sweet of you to argue it for me, sis," Imoen gave one of those smiles that was usually successful in getting her out of trouble for her latest adventure.

"Look, was this Algernon doing anything unscrupulous with the cloak?" Prudence said. Certainly such powers could be misused, and that disturbing thought worried her...

"Well...technically, not that I know of," Imoen admitted. "He was just some sort of merchant. But he could have?"

"Then we'll go on with the task for now, use it if we have to, and you can return it to Algernon, next time you see him," Prudence said. It was valuable, it didn't belong to them, and a paladin had to say something along these lines. Stuck-up and sanctimonious she might be to Imoen, but under the circumstances... They started to move on once more.

"And what if he turned me over to the guards?" Imoen said. "You'd come and see me and smuggle me my tools, wouldn't you, Pru? Bake a pie with them in it and make me eat it so's I could escape, or pretend to be the warden's daughter with an extra large laundry basket, or cut out the pages of a boring book and stick a file in there, or... You would, right?"

 _Of course I would, paladin conduct or no paladin conduct!_ was Prudence's thought; "Maybe," she said. "Try not to invoke it?"

"Oh, not a problem there, I'm getting better at the shadow trick," Imoen said, unrepressed.

—

"—And they found Joseph the miner," the young guardsman said, fair-haired below his helm. "Two days ago. He went deep; they say when one of his friends took him out, most of the body had been...eaten. It was only by his ring they knew who he was..."

Men who were dead, Prudence thought. If somehow they'd arrived earlier, then perhaps... They had tried, but it wasn't good enough.

"Clear the way for those of us who ain't gutless cowards," Montaron said, and she glared at him.

The guardsman flushed pink; "I'm not here to deal with demons!" he said. "We're grateful enough to you adventurers, if you don't die like the others, but we don't do what's not in our charter." His armour was in poorer condition than her chain, rusting, and his helmet and scabbard were badly tarnished.

"These demons," Prudence said, trying to return the conversation to improved channels, "they...eat flesh; they make noises in the walls—"

"High yips, the miners in the deep used to say when they could still be paid to go down there," said the second guard, short and dark, "and those still alive say the things you bring down there will burst into fire without warning; shadows you'd swear were there a moment ago disappear when you look behind you; and the curse on the iron itself, as if something's been wakened from the deeps that rightly shouldn't be. We lost good men of ours. It's no place for a man to be, down there."

"Yipping noises," Jaheira said thoughtfully. "We have heard enough, I think. I thank you for your information."

There were torches set into the walls, on the upper level; a flickering, yellow light that Prudence could imagine to look hellish. Guards, red-faced and armoured, walked regularly between the lights. The heat was strong and suffocating, and the miners themselves wore nothing but loincloths as they quietly went about their work, subdued and cautious to look over their shoulders, rolling heavy carts and carrying heavy tools. She could believe it a place of human misery even without the present troubles. Outside, they'd walked past the shantytown of tents, where most of the miners lived eight out of a tenday and only returned to their homes for two.

The mines covered area vaster than Prudence had pictured, which showed the number of mines she'd travelled to before; at least five main tunnels branched from that first broad and wide cavern.

"I've seen them—" One of the miners stopped his carting of a wheelbarrow to speak. "Alak saw them, I heard him scream of yellow eyes, I brought back the guards, and two of them never returned either. Hauled Alak out of there, and the garrison's cleric couldn't heal his leg. Scaled demons, they are. Little scaled demons straight out of the wall with teeth and fire and smelling like death, something worse under them. You'll find them? Will you find them?—" The miner reached out and grabbed Prudence's arm, his own eyes wide and almost feverish in fear. "Kylee's down somewhere. Give him his dagger. He'll need it, he's still down there, or will you disappear like the others?"

"We'll try," she said, trying to sound reassuring. "What does Kylee look like?" A mundane question; the man gave a a reasonable enough answer. That he was another miner; that the previous day he had been posted to a darker depth; that he had not been seen since.

"On this way," Montaron said roughly, jerking a grimy thumb at a tunnel that seemed indistinguishable to the others near it.

"You are certain?" Jaheira said. "You are no dwarf, though one could mistake your grime for an inadequate beard."

"Got this, don't I?" Montaron waved a dirty piece of parchment, marked with dark ink. "Reckon that lump o' flesh stuck to yer bootheel might've something to say of travelling with a banshee's scream in his ear...if'n he could."

"No unfortunate comparisons to other humanoid species, no remarks on relations, no insults on language delivery..." Prudence said. It wasn't very successful. "Very practical, a map," she said instead. "Could you lead on, Montaron?"

"I did not see him request it from the proprietor," Jaheira snapped. The red-clad Emerson had only allowed them a day in the mines, not enthused about another group of adventurers investigating; Montaron had done some of the talking to him...

"Master o' the mines would have plenty of copies for himself, wouldn't he?" Montaron said.

"Never mind it, Jaheira..."

"So," Imoen said cheerily, "it's okay to pickpocket maps but not to take magic cloaks? Then again, I guess you know all about how to do cloak theft properly, Pru—"

That story about the Blackstaff had followed her around for long years even though she couldn't remember it herself and Imoen hadn't been at Candlekeep at the time. "There's at least a quantitative difference," Prudence said quickly.

"Ooo, subtle, yet insulting," Montaron said.

 _I really shouldn't encourage them—_

"Yeah, it looks like I win," Imoen boasted, patting the enchanted material. "Want to see my Wand of Magic Missiles?" Prudence had not asked where she'd obtained that in Candlekeep.

"...Nah, too easy, kid..."

Xzar gasped loudly, and pointed dramatically at a torch on the walls. Its flame flickered in wild directions, casting strange shadows on the group. They'd not yet stepped a great distance within the mines, but at the moment there was no nearby sound of other human activity. Then Prudence felt a cold wind across her face; at that moment the torch died. The first fiery arrow came at them in the darkness.

"Im! Get _back_ , light tinder—" Prudence rolled forward, away from the heat; she'd been slightly singed, the arrow hadn't been very close to her. The direction of the arrow—she'd her shield raised, running against it and hoping for protection.

 _Certainly not demons—_

She ran into something sharp that scraped the side of her arm, and brought her shield forward. It rammed into the small creature half her height; there was a yipping noise. Its blade darted at her again, a painful impact that did not pierce her mail. She swung her own weapon in a low arc. Cut into something, metal striking against hard bone. A high cry. A fast-moving projectile by her face from behind; they were ambushed and Jaheira and Xzar chanted in the back. She flung herself aside and down again, the moment before the blazing light briefly filled the passage. The very creature she'd attacked was itself seared by the flames, and she saw it clearly: scaled, a doglike muzzle, slightly taller than a gibberling. By description: kobold. Arrows of fire, and movement behind the others as well—surrounded—

Jaheira's chant finished. A faint firelight, continuing, appeared for them; Imoen had done it, lit her tinder. Distantly Prudence saw a pale spark lance from in the shadows, arcane magic. Had to stop the arrows, she knew, and was already sprinting; Khalid was near her doing likewise, his shield raised, a light glow glittering briefly upon him and seeming to fade into his skin.

 _Therefore Jaheira and Montaron for the ones behind—_

There were four shadows before them, their bows raised. She was ahead of Khalid, and with little finesse struck forward, quickly. Three of them jumped back from her blade; but the fourth had loosed an arrow, the fire exploding beyond her at Khalid—

And he made no cry; he still ran on. The arrow was in his left shoulder, apparently not piercing far through his armour. If she'd been but that little bit faster—the last kobold drew a shortsword in place of a bow, and the four of them swarmed her until Khalid joined the fight. They were small and thin, and quick; an attack with one of their swords pierced through her thick trousers. Not rusted or falling apart, these. In battle Khalid seemed to lose uncertainty, expertly moving forward, cautious with his shield and without a wasted movement for his longsword. Prudence used her own shield to push the two attacking her away; used the space to swing her blade. They were fast. Her scimitar left a slash through flesh, though in the low light it was hard to see the extent of harm. Khalid easily killed one, and the small body fell to the ground. Four kobolds— No more fiery arrows shot by them. She killed one of the creatures by a downward slash, breaking open its skull; and then the last was down, to her and Khalid both. Small creatures...

"I can heal you," she blurted out to Khalid, but he easily withdrew the arrow from his shoulder.

"C-caught in my gambeson; and Jaheira protected me against fire," he said. "You are— Jaheira?"

"Three sneaking kobolds here," Jaheira called dourly, "no harm done. Imoen, relight the torch if you are able."

Jaheira half-smiled in the firelight, transferring her hold of her quarterstaff from one hand to the other. "Yipping demons indeed," she said, "the signs of the guard indicated mere kobolds. Still, they seemed organised; there must be some guiding force..."

"Druid, get to casting," Montaron said; the right sleeve of his leather armour was blackened by burning. "Try anything else and I'll know it." Jaheira glared at him as she spoke the words of her healing spell quickly.

"Do not presume on my generosity for you, thief."

"Fiery kobolds, not from the Nine Hells at all, and I stole their energy and it feels good—" Xzar brushed some traces of smoke from his face with the sleeve of his robe. "Can we go on now? Do we have to waste these moments of irritating repose?" He bounced lightly on his feet.

"Yeah, that really helped ever so much," Imoen said, with a degree of sarcasm. "Can't you do something useful? Magelight or something? I can't use my bow if I have to hold a torch myself."

"How long can you keep a light sustained?" Prudence said; they were still in an area lit for the miners, even if the kobolds had the ability to extinguish the flares. Montaron pulled away from Jaheira as the spell finished, scowling and brushing down his wounded arm.

Xzar smiled. The shadows cast dark and shifting patterns between his tattoos, and his eyes narrowed to a sharp, bright stare. "Duration can be changed by components chosen," he said, and rummaged with enthusiasm in one of his mage's pouches. They had been scrubbed to a clean white, and there was quite a lot of them.

" _Vitiumque in lumina mentis..._ "

It had been the bird Montaron had killed. The skeleton reassembled itself in Xzar's hands; the bleached bones quickly returned to their shape, transfixed by magic, and a green glow suffused it. A full skeletal bird, shining with pale light in place of the flesh and feathers it had in life. It flew above their heads in complete silence. The white bones of the bird's wings glided without motion, and within and about its skeleton the artificial green light rained over them all. In a way, it was almost pretty.

"Unnatural," Jaheira said flatly; "Come, we shall find their other nests and clear this area. I cannot believe that these kobolds have the daring to come so close to the upper part of the mine."

"Too damned slow," Montaron said, tossing and catching a throwing knife in his right hand.

"They have the mobility advantage up here," Prudence said. The accounts of the miners: lightning-fast attacks out of the walls. "We should warn a guard that it's kobolds—I suppose other _yipping demons_ have been disposing of other bodies of their own—and go deep. That's where whatever's organising them ought to be." _If you can remove the firewood from under the oven the heat can no longer be stoked_ , the metaphor ran.

"You are not concerned for the nearby miners?" Jaheira said. Jaheira was right even if she felt the accusation undeserved, Prudence told herself; the lives of the people working here weighed far above any other reasons for investigating the iron crisis.

"That's our duty. More easily accomplished by finding what the miners claim lies below, first," she said. Chasing gangs of kobolds through terrain they knew well, while other things still waited below to prepare; not the best choice...

"For the group, then," Jaheira said, and scowled down at Montaron, rummaging across the body of a fallen kobold. He flashed a mocking grin up at her;

"Fetch th' spare fire arrows whilst ye can."

—

A screaming human man. Jaheira had cast protections on all the group; at some effort, for her preparations had focused upon the more directly unnatural. Arrows flared in the air, but the fires caused them no harm; the attacks ricocheted off their shields—

Their way had been before besought by kobolds, and yet more of them fought here, a line of three archers to the back, four of the creatures dancing around their victim, a human man. Montaron had been ahead, looking through the darkness ahead before their light could attract attention, but at the cries they had all rushed forward. She and Khalid both had their shields raised around the man; Prudence saw Montaron's blade fall swiftly into the nearest kobold, its scales a sickly yellowish-brown under Xzar's light. An arrow burst to fire against her shield; had to stop the archers—

Jaheira had scattered seeds to the ground across from her position, had chanted; dark vines ripped at all of the creatures, reaching up to tangle their arms as well. She continued to cast to manipulate the plants; Prudence ran forward, slashed through—small creatures, but their fellows had caused Jaheira to use several healing spells already, from arrows and attacking in their groups. Jaheira's strong voice moved the vines still, her power restraining the kobolds against running back into their darkness.

"Kylee," Prudence said, turning back at the man; he stood next to Khalid, surrounded by the small bodies. He carried a short sword that he had not used with particular ability, and fit the description. "Your friend Dink wanted us to find you. He gave us your dagger. How did you come here?" Dink had not been able to direct them to an exact location; it was a great relief that they had come upon him alive.

"Much obliged to you. 'Twas a dead guard, poor bastard, that one o' Captain Fals' they couldn't find again—took his sword, took his water. Clutched the walls, needed to stay out of sight of them yipping ones, needed to escape. Fell down from the south pits, lost my light—" He shook his head, staring wild-eyed. Jaheira calmly offered him a flask from her pack, a tincture to settle the mind, and after he drank he seemed better.

"Would you like us to take you back?" Prudence offered.

Kylee wiped a hand across his mouth. "This path...I remember it when times were still good." He looked around in the light. "Did you clear the way as you came?"

"Yes," Montaron said. He raised the map, and would have shoved it in the man's face were he of the same height. "Went thisaway. Look clear enough to ye, fool?"

"Actually, yes," Kylee nodded. "Give me a light and I'll be up there to tell 'em I made it. Know where I am, now. You wouldn't believe that once these walls were full of good iron." He brought the hilt of his dagger to a grey seam in the stone, and chipped at it; a dark substance crumbled away from it. He nodded glumly. "You work on getting those kobolds."

Imoen lit a torch for him; and carrying his dagger in his other hand, he left them.

"We should continue quickly while Silvanus' protection lasts; we have prepared the way for him," Jaheira said.

Imoen was bent down over a kobold's body; Montaron, likewise, searched for their arrows. She straightened up with a green flask in her hand. "Here's some kind of kobold drink, or I suppose healing potion—there's others that've got the same," she said.

"Mage, ye've a use at last. Just don't drink it," Montaron said gruffly. Apparently none too soon, for Xzar was quick to take hold of the vial, tilting it above his head.

He poured a drop of it on his little finger instead. "Highly corrosive. The smell of rust the smell of blood of acid instead of iron vitriolic scattering smell of saltpetre; I must a boiling point experiment and addition of water absorption test."

"You've hurt yourself," Prudence said. The liquid _rotted away_ skin; and he was _watching_ it, a stain spreading— "Stop it—"

"Certainly effective upon organic material," Xzar said, not looking at any of them, the sound of his voice betraying no pain and talking of analysis; "a liquid reaction of positive thermic transfer; I sense power and unstable bonds between its particles; Monty, could you hand over your blade?—" He passed the vial to his injured hand, and dug quickly in his robes for a small dark lump. He sniffed it and quickly raised it to the bird's green-tinted light.

"An' they dare call ye halfway competent in alchemy," Montaron muttered.

"A blade; my—necromantic experiments, well, the less interesting ones—for someone else's blade—" Xzar said.

"Look, do you want healing or not?" Prudence confiscated the vial from him; that was the white of his bone, becoming visible under the effect; it was a terrible poison—

"A concentrate into the isolated purity of air over burned acid, I would guess—it's for _experiment_ , this, I've seen worse—" Xzar added to her, though he didn't pull his hand away. "Blade, Monty."

Corrosive and ugly and dark it was, the poison; Prudence cast—it was still eating away at his right hand, he was reckless—a liquid; there ought to be no trace of malevolence felt, that in a quick use of healing she should sense nothing but the shaped prayer. But to her there was a trace of something disturbing in it, as if below the alchemic smell of the compound something that wasn't Xzar's spell components rotted in the background. Something of the anomaly must have showed on her face.

"That's interesting," he said, flexing his restored, pink hand. "Religious types who hurt themselves! Sensing things, the ones they say are mad—" He stepped sharply backward. "Pour what you took from me on that kobold's sword if Monty won't give you any, witness the effect."

She'd an idea of what he guessed at, if hardly what he had been thinking; careful that the substance did not touch her armour, she quickly poured it on the stained blade of one of the kobolds, and hit it against the wall. It fell apart, tarnished.

"'Tis the solution to our quest! Let there be warmth and rejoicement—no, experimental verification, allow for confirmation—" Xzar bent and scooped up one of the fragments of the kobold's sword, and compared the result with his first dark rock of tainted iron. His mouth moved into his wild, lopsided grin, and he danced. "Merriment and libations of serous ichor, everyone! For such is the nature of the iron crisis, by important thaumaturgic art proven—"

"It's hardly over. Curb your theatrics," Jaheira ordered coldly, and then seemed to reconsider slightly. "On the other hand: if you wish your part in resolving the iron crisis to be done, I withdraw my objection."

Montaron, carrying his shortsword unsheathed, slowly looked up at her. "Ye've still got to find the reason for Ghastkill's enjoyment. Isn't that right, lady?" Mayor Berrun Ghastkill had known and spoken to Jaheira, the only female half-elf in the group.

"Our motives are none of your concern, halfling. Silence yourself, before I do it for you."

That was Jaheira's overt aggression, this time. Prudence added it to her mental tally of the ongoing dispute. "You were right before, Jaheira," she said; "we need to move on. Perhaps even quietly, in case we bring too many kobolds upon us."

"We are not at all finished yet," Xzar said. He'd abstracted a second vial from the kobolds, hanging it from his belt. "For we are inside the onion, not outside it!" Montaron brought a hand to his forehead. "Peel a layer out, and a larger remains further up and further beyond, a circle out of a circle the instant something appears to have been unravelled—"

"You were quite c-correct about the kobolds and noise, Prudence," Khalid said.

—

They were all singed, scratched, and scraped; the fire protections had been worn down, and they waited.

"Heaps of 'em! It's a big encampment in that cave." Imoen emerged from the darkness, Montaron not far behind her. "Counted twenty-six, armed and everything."

"Twenty-nine." Montaron said. They were deep in the mine; they passed occasional signs of humans still, but the miners' arrangements of torches were long gone.

"Xzar—another Grease spell?" Prudence said. She wasn't sure of his state; he stood quietly for the time being, having cast several times.

"Five rabbits tearing by small claw; perhaps, yes, I will. Clever and appropriate!" he said. "—If you were thinking of that..." he added, watching her.

That advantage, of course—not pleasant to think of it, but Jaheira had healed Imoen of a deep scratch to her thigh, and kobolds weren't usually assumed sapient. A plan which achieved the objective with minimal damage to the group.

"All right, we'll do it. If we finish them quickly," Prudence said. "Im, you're ready?"

"Sure, I'll do it."

"An added trigger," Xzar said complacently.

Jaheira frowned, giving Xzar in particular the benefit of her glare; Khalid and Montaron also bore looks of slight confusion. "Exactly what are you talking about?" she demanded. "I am capable of entangling them myself."

Imoen spoke up to explain. "The Grease spell's usually got oil as a main component—catches fire easy. I remember that much."

"I see." Jaheira looked rather grim, and nodded. "I cannot object, I suppose."

Grease, the spell component of oil-soaked cloth loosed from a borrowed crossbow at a distance, and multiplied itself quickly into a vast field underfoot. That alerted the kobolds, of course; a first group of them broke from the spreading oil, where Prudence waited next to Khalid and Montaron. A fire arrow Imoen had from the kobolds whistled above her head, and landed; and the trap of grease exploded, burning with fierce heat, but confined to the extent of the oil. A smell of roasting flesh, and the high yipping screams of pain. There was guilt at that, but resolve, that it was necessary— Prudence aimed bolts from her crossbow while there was yet a chance, bringing down two of the burned kobolds, and then drew her scimitar.

 _If you have to, do it quick; for sometimes that's the only mercy you can grant_ —

Some of the kobolds had clambered to the cavern's roof, and jumped, shrieking, down at their heads. Imoen cried out the incantation for her wand, quick flashes of bright pink that impacted without fail; Jaheira likewise threw sling bullets carefully past those fighting. Prudence felt the heat almost palpable on her face, though it began to die almost as quickly as the fire had exploded in the field of oil. Not as strong as a mage's fireball.

She heard Jaheira's shout from behind. Kobolds from that side as well, not entirely unexpected; she had to trust that Jaheira would take them. No more help from Imoen and Xzar here, then. She raised her shield against an arrow aimed from the cavern's roof, of mundane wood rather than fire.

"Khalid! Bow?" Prudence said; she stepped in front of him, trying to distract the kobolds. Let them have to pass her— She used her shield in defence; Montaron was more aggressive, cutting through, but best they kept together. Khalid's aim with his longbow was excellent even in low light, and she saw a body fall quickly from the cavern's ceiling. Burned bodies were left where the fire had flickered, and the numbers decreased; kobolds, a mass of them, but angle swiftly and they scattered. Then she slashed widely to keep them from Khalid—an arrow in flight slipped past her—

"Nature take the life she gave—" Jaheira called triumphantly from behind, and her husband cried out.

It pierced him; Prudence saw the spreading bloodstain on Khalid's chest when she looked, and there were fewer kobolds before them now. She lowered her defences in favour of speed of attack, fortunate that she escaped the kobolds taking advantage; killed another of the small bodies, let it die while Montaron stabbed again. She turned away. Speed was vital, everyone travelling with them was vital—

She grasped at the arrow; the upper right of Khalid's torso, near the thin kleis-bone, at an iron-weakened point in his armour. First, to understand it—the position of the arrow was near to the artery, and from the way it bled likely that. Important not to leave fragments in the flesh, to heal properly as well as quickly; the instructions were there for her mind to call upon even as the kobolds yipped behind. She laid a hand on the wound, focused upon slowing the bleeding, isolating the position of the arrow; then pulled carefully. The head came free and intact and bloodied, and she gave the casting direction to mend the wound and piece the flesh back together. Control the healing through glove and clothing, let the impurities be removed from the blood—

The injury took little time to heal, though it sapped at her—behind her the kobolds moved, as she ought to well know their placing. She flung the stained arrow to the ground as one of them lunged at her; but it was Khalid who helped, simply stepping forward with his longsword. It would have been a backstab to her kidneys, otherwise.

Dead kobolds littered the ground.

"S-so many places I would rather be," Khalid sighed, lowering his shield.

"You did a foolish thing, child," Jaheira lectured, stepping across to them, her quarterstaff stained with blood and brain matter. "Stepping away from the battle for that time—" She looked more softly in the direction of her husband. "Not an ill instinct, Prudence, but misplaced. An arrow itself slows bleeding if left in place, and there may not be need to heal until after the battle is done."

"Clever sermon, taskmaster." Montaron returned his stained blade to its sheath. "Better t' spend your time dragging _him_ off." He gestured behind, to where a flash of green robe suggested that Xzar knelt behind a crevice in the wall that partly blocked him from view.

"Monty, don't be so aggravating, I'm very busy and this one is quite perfect for my needs."

Jaheira sharply stepped forward. "I will tolerate your arts no further, necromancer! Do not dare to—"

"Arise, stripped fragment of a mortal shell, pretty shards of onyx, sprinkling of gravedirt. Arise, undead minion, and become my...kobold zombie."

The kobold had scales mottled between red and dark brown, and had been killed by a single arrow through its throat, the body otherwise undamaged. It stood to its full height of a little below Montaron; it shuffled slowly and mindlessly forward. Undead; slow-moving; incapable of thought; able to take more physical punishment than a living entity. Xzar cackled, and his excited laughter echoed in a manner _not_ advisable through the caverns. His grin stretched wide as if surprised at his success; green light danced in his eyes. A wild and compelling enthusiasm. And as lacking in conscious malice as in sensible moderation.

"It _works_ —" A threatening gesture from Montaron temporarily stopped Xzar's voice.

"Well, I guess it's sort of cute if it's downwind and really far away from me," Imoen said, looking dubiously down at it. "Little Boldy the Kobold Zombie."

"'Tis unpleasant enough when accomplished by divine means," Jaheira said, breathing heavily, "but by the unnatural arts it has gone more than far enough—!"

"I don't suppose," Prudence said, "that keeping it downwind from you as well would work as a compromise?" _It wouldn't hurt to have a cohort of skeletal minions summoned by a cleric to our side, like the accounts of Vrelle Taturga of the Red Knight, not that we can't accomplish this as we are..._

"D-dear, I think we should remain calm...no matter the p-provocation," Khalid said.

"There is a limit as to what is expected of us," Jaheira said. Druids and necromancers; as much in common with each other as Helmites and Sharessans, Prudence had known from the start. Or was there more to the hostility than that, with Jaheira's claim that she failed to understand?

"Don't see me complaining, do ye? Suck it up, druid," Montaron said.

"Your assistance, halfling," Jaheira snapped, her eyes flashing with a dangerous brightness, "is hardly needed against such small foes. You tread on thin ice indeed, and Eldath would hardly welcome the likes of you."

Montaron snarled, his face twisting; "Ye'll learn not to make light of me, wench. My purpose is greater than you can—" He moved his wrist, and perhaps there was a glint of metal under his sleeve—

"Decide well your next move," Jaheira said, her quarterstaff waiting between her hands; her pose was ready to snap into action. "I doubt the necromancer and his abomination will prove of assistance to you—"

"No, we should surrender to your superior force, oh green-casting lady of the well-mulched forest," Xzar interjected, a casual tone to his voice; he leaned on the cavern wall with his arms folded across his chest, one boot raised to rest vertically against the wall. "So many castings left to you from the oak-leaved daddy, isn't that right, xylocephalous one?" Deliberately nonchalant, as if this were a game.

"'Tis true I could strike you down with Silvanus' power," Jaheira said, the sharp edge of her voice making the threat very plain. "And were you to surrender in truth, you would be treated with none less than the most complete degree of justice."

"This needs to last only as long as it takes to clear the mines," Prudence said, irritated—angry, she thought, at both of them. _Solve it._ "I don't believe anyone here to be incapable of reason." Montaron mentioned Xzar's name; a good diversion from his fight with Jaheira. "It's foolish to come to blows here; at least wait until afterwards, which shouldn't be long—and not even then!" she added. "Go your separate ways, if you must."

"Oh, why not indeed," Xzar said, his voice smooth and rich, and unceasing. "Certainly Monty and I have our own leads to pursue following this diversion, our own commissions to execute and all that along those general lines. We may do so very well without interference, with a sort of haphazard treatise, that we stand as different contractors of different roles. Reach a quiet settlement and depart upon very unmelodramatic terms. Why not, from this merry band? None would pretend to be a rooster-feathered basilisk, the deep centre of kobold alterations. Nuggets of ruthless reason and natural decision upon knowledge available, a response to diverse choice."

 _The mines_ , Prudence knew; _keeping everyone together was the most important thing at the moment. Everything else should be spoken of later—her sister, Xzar._

"Ye spoke basic sense th' first few lines there, fool," Montaron said. "Our own purposes indeed."

"It would be wrong to waste your time," Prudence said to him, "look ahead for shadows and traps; Im, if you would—"

"Hey, don't even need to ask. I'll keep an eye out for everything, y'know?" Imoen strung her bow behind her back in an easy movement.

"And Khalid—if you could otherwise lead," Prudence said. He was strong and the best-armoured. "And the zombie in the back."

—

Down under here there was the faint sound of water; perhaps an underground river flowed somewhere, some distance away. There was a touch of moisture in the air, clammy and cool in its staleness. The tunnels were rough, and seemed at least partly natural; obvious signs of human labour had faded away.

More parties of kobolds had blocked their path. Prudence reflexively moved her hand again toward her waist, and stopped herself; there had been an arrow implanted there, the smell of roasting on her burning flesh, pain that had shocked her by its intensity. She felt drained of her own capacity to turn prayers to healing, and Jaheira had cast far more druidic spells upon all of them. They stepped around a large grey rock, and then across a bridge where Imoen had cut down a tripwire. The traps indicated habitation of a more threatening sort.

She looked across at the kobold zombie, which was damaged by several arrows and a slash that had almost severed its right arm, continuing to shamble near Xzar. Its wounds had not bled much, as an ordinary corpse after death. Its creator walked near to it, and had hid behind it at the last small group of kobolds.

"Necromantic minions." He giggled softly in the darkness. "If you truly have the Art, and you let them stop you using it, then it turns impossible. Ever so very useful. Yet nobody appreciates skill, do they? Keep walking, good zombie."

 _I'm sorry, I do like you but my sister's not interested in travelling with you_ , she might have said in a more peaceful environment _._ It lacked a certain finesse.

"You're out of spells, aren't you?" she said.

"Perhaps! One tries to learn and to advance; yet every capacity exhausts itself; yet the thing is elastic and supposed to be ever expanding among the headaches—perhaps I tire, and what then? The Weave is obliged to grow constantly; I try and still cannot saturate in it." He looked slightly miserable; tired, as she was denying in herself after the kobold battles and this lengthy, stoned path to the mines' depths. "At least I have this consolation." He placed a proprietary arm on the zombie's shoulder, leaning upon it. "Sometimes it fails—concentration, size of necromantically compelled object. A void and a cell memory of what used to work and the coalescing field of the caster." He paused briefly. "And as for your own vaunted powers over the undead?"

It was...easy to talk to him. For now, the dark tunnels were well-surrounded by thick rock, and quiet. "I've only faced illusionary zombies. I don't know." The comforting weight of her symbol of divine focus lay at her neck below her clothing; she could pray for that holy power to destroy or confuse antagonistic undead, but she'd no practice against creatures outside Obe's images.

" _Illusions_ ," he said, lending the word all the standard contempt of a mage's opposing school. "Or the healing hands: if you place your hand across the zombie's heart and make it to beat new blood through red arteries once more, do you torment it then?"

The positive energy of a divine casting against a negative arcane casting; one would damage the other. A dramatic, if gruesome, image. "Given that zombies don't feel pain, it wouldn't be torment."

"Are you certain?" He stood straighter in his walk, the cowl of his robes loose behind his head. "This very one has made little noises at being hit—they usually do, if they've enough flesh remaining on their vocal cords. It doesn't stop them from obeying the commands of their dread masters until they're torn to pieces, but—little pained noises. Poor underappreciated undead. Torture them if you feel like it."

He'd know, she supposed; information was useful even if her vocation concentrated upon the destruction rather than manufacturing stages. "Surely that's some physical reflex—dead, mindless, soulless. Less self-aware than, say, cows." Of which there was dried beef in all their packs bar Jaheira's. "Not to want to torture them, but..." The kobold zombie shuffled quietly on.

"'Mindless'? An exaggeration. It's all in the preservation," Xzar said. "At least as far as I have learned it's a positive correlation with the degree of preservation. Theoretically one could also soul-bind. But not that!" He shook his head forcefully. "Don't want hidden eyes in the gems and the... How I do become occupied by tangents."

This was the sort of conversation that Imoen started to think of as creepy.

"By my calculations, if the process is activated soon enough with the right preservatives: something remains in the brain," he said. "There is supposed to be that which lies beyond the patterns of impulses in the cells, empirically unreachable; it ought to disappear, but what can be left behind? Where lies the border of what can be imitated?" His voice changed suddenly to a high wail, spoken as a ragged whisper; " _Xzar! Xzar...come here...my Xzar...don't run..._ "

He talked, and so much of it was obscure to make sense of; perhaps it was part defence of vulnerability, but in fact the more anyone said, the more they gave away to others. "Book four of Gallen, isn't it?" Prudence said. Calm normalcy; she drew from her studies and labour in the Candlekeep temple. "His scried observations of tissue degeneration. Brain matter is fast to decay and difficult to regenerate, which is why only powerful priests can even try to return people's souls to their bodies." If they were young enough to still wish to come back.

"I remember well. A necromancer's anatomy," Xzar said. "Comforting equations and figures, or not. An hour's space of time and much was dissipated; less with the cold equations of temperature. It's why the part that can think for itself must be preserved, in these planes where there's so much left to learn...And better to _do so_."

There was a smell in the air of something else decaying, some stench that all was not quiet here. Prudence went forward, closer to Khalid and Jaheira; the mine's walls were a maze of rock, jagged and pointed spars casting long shadows, stalagmites rising below a damp roof.

Jaheira sniffed the air. "Fouler than that necromancer," she said, and Prudence thought she shared something of the feeling of negative anticipation, the sense of moving closer to the source of the mine's corruption. Jaheira stopped, and stared at the widening walls about them; Prudence tried to search for what might be sensed there. The trio of giant spiders descended swiftly from the dark irregular shadows of the cavern's roof, and Imoen screamed that she saw a ghoul.

Jaheira had moved in time and brought her quarterstaff to the eyes of the spider attacking her; Prudence felt spikes cutting her forehead and back. Her shield blindly hit up, the pressure of the cutting weight slightly raised from her; she went down, an undignified roll that turned into a stooped stance. Blood ran into her eyes; she knew she was weakening, the wounds stinging badly and she could guess it to be spider's poison.

Imoen was near Khalid; he fought a monster with swollen, melting flesh—so many different things were called monsters, this was a humanoid probably-human corpse, degenerated, walking, shimmering with a sick animating redness while its long nails struck at its opponent—and Imoen darted behind him, her hands reaching to free her bow from her back.

The spiders; a fight on at least two fronts; ground of the enemy's territory— The spider rushed toward her: a dark body, two pale spots on its head, a strangeness about the edges of its form as if its black colour bled into the shadows around it. Not much strength left to her; had to fight quickly, Prudence thought, her head muddled by pain. She lunged forward and the blade fell short of its goal, lightly touching the spider's flesh. It moved, lowered its body briefly; and those limbs stretched again, at almost impossible speed. It jumped—above her height, falling down, a harsh impact on her shield, the sharp limbs reaching around it to wound her. Larger than Landrin's collection; faster, at that, or was it her own body that faded? She disentangled herself, stepped back; the spider followed easily. She'd expected it to do so. Her scimitar was where its eyes moved to, but she'd not the strength left for a followthrough. The spider bled, undeterred; she tangled her blade between its legs, delaying at the least. She withdrew, then; her body's weight drew the scimitar with it, cutting into the leg. She nearly fell to the ground, the wounds inflamed by poison, something virulent that sapped quickly away at health—

A column of rock nearby. There was a quick flare ahead that had to be Imoen drawing her bow; behind, a spider much larger than the zombie. The stone was half cover and half support, and she leaned upon it, letting the spider come. Had to put strength into it, she thought, her head muddled by pain; or second-best blind it. The spider's legs and fangs reached for her around the stone. She raised the scimitar high; crudely, near to the head—the blade's own weight carried it further, cutting the creature's eyes. Stopped its vision, she hoped. It knew where she was; it came along the ground. Blood dripped from her arm to the stone. It would tense, prepared to jump again; it lowered its body for that moment and again she sought for fading strength. Brain matter of a sort behind the exoskeleton in the head. Close enough aim—she dropped her shield, a foolish move, but needed both hands pressing down—forced the weapon to pierce through that thick head. The venom of the bite drowned her veins.

Jaheira behind her. "Poison," the druid flatly muttered, "no teneros root? You can do nothing; I will heal you—"

Montaron and Khalid fought three of the ghouls, Imoen behind them, running back, an arrow undrawn on her bow because she was chased too closely; a spider killed by quarterstaff lying dead; Xzar, backed against a cavern wall by the same kind of giant spider, the zombie failing miserably to fight it.

Jaheira's spell caught; Prudence felt her head clear and the pain taken from her body.

"I will aid the necromancer, little as he deserves it—" Jaheira said; she went to the spider menacing Xzar. Jaheira could have easily dealt with the creature; but it needed to be done quickly, and Prudence followed her.

"Where is the water source?" she said. Jaheira had reached the creature more quickly than she, at the moment the zombie was trampled and those fangs reaching down to bite a huge chunk from head and torso. They both turned it from the trapped wizard, Jaheira's staff giving her excellent range.

"You want to—" Jaheira's eyes slipped across to the ghouls, four of them, ordinary blades doing little against skin that barely bled and Imoen still seeking a clear shot. "Running water; yes, I sense it is close enough."

Prudence's blade cut beyond the spider's legs into black thorax; the end of Jaheira's quarterstaff slammed down upon its head. The fangs turned to Prudence and she flinched away in memory, though not so badly as the wizard's flailing, a dagger fairly useless against a creature that size. Unwise to get poisoned again; she cut into it, the dark shell parting, though it was Jaheira's beatings that likely did the most damage. It fell on top of Xzar, tangling him in its spiked limbs;

"Follow me," Jaheira called loudly, and turned; she ran at an easy jog to the right, unerring through the shadows. Khalid turned after her willingly, the ghouls pursuing him; Imoen's pale face moved through the darkness, Montaron next to her.

Prudence pushed aside the spider's body, helping the wizard to their undignified retreat. He was bleeding through his robes, taking a potion; she would have worried for him, but he stood and ran despite a paleness below the black patterns on his face.

Then the magelight blinked out; she could see only by the faint red light of the ghouls' energy, and follow Jaheira by ear. Dark and almost nightmareish, easy to stumble, with the knowledge that the ghouls behind them had the power to freeze movement with a touch—

Khalid slashed across, guarding the rear; he was fast and untouched by the ghouls' clawing hands, and of course he could see in this light. Prudence felt a rock in the path hit her shins, and tried to guard against crying out; Jaheira was ahead, there the sound of her sure steps.

"We near—hold them off," Jaheira said. Khalid turned without reluctance and held his shield steady, blocking a clawed attack and stabbing a ghoul's face. There were perhaps five of them now, in that narrow passage, difficult to count without light.

A torch bloomed to life in Imoen's hands. The undead disliked fire; "Give it to me," Khalid said, stutter temporarily gone from his voice, and he stepped back and lowered his sword in preparation.

The ghouls were bloated as the victims of drowning were said to be, or the late states of putrefaction; stages beyond which most healing abilities could hardly help. A stench of their decaying bodies, and beyond that a sense of corruption that she did not wish to feel in greater depth. She had only to shield, Prudence told herself; Montaron had become more circumspect in his approach to a fight, halfway falling back and stabbing to block a ghoul's claws rather than to sink his shortsword into already melting flesh.

 _I fight in defence of others_ —she prayed, though underneath that was a simple plea that she would not run. _Imoen, Khalid, Montaron, Xzar, Jaheira, the miners fallen to such creatures._ Then the claws darted inhumanly fast to her shoulder; scraped her chainmail, and she feared piercing pain through it—ducked back, quickly, no fresh wounds opened in her, cloth intact below ripped mail. Khalid stepped forward again with the torch, and thrust the fire into the face of the nearest ghoul. There was a moan from it—Prudence wondered if such did feel pain after all, in Xzar's words, but the brain decayed, they had only the ill intent a creator animated them by—and it fought still, its rotting skin blackened but the taint of its animation as strong as ever.

"P-powerful, these, or well protected—" Khalid said. "Hold back—shield—" She did not need encouragement to use that strategy, Prudence thought, and hoped that she was not too greatly a coward.

"The water is tainted by waste but yet within Silvanus' power," Jaheira's strong voice rang out. "Lure them; I will cast." She called to Silvanus, speaking a druid's language of earth and living water.

Imoen held tinder steadily enough to see by; Khalid fought with fire, but it hardly wounded more than the sword. Prudence stepped back again with Khalid; by the direction of Jaheira's voice there was some leeway of distance. The casting continued; the ghouls swarmed.

"Im, arrows—give the light—" Prudence said. There was little Xzar could do; but he was standing there, relatively unhurt— Imoen handed him the flaring tinder, and held her bow ready.

There was little space for proper aim for Imoen; Prudence took care to duck, partly stepping aside, covering the gap with shield held low lest the ghoul break through, and one of the kobolds' arrows burned a ghoul's flesh. They kept them back, until Jaheira was done.

"Imoen, _through_ ," Jaheira ordered; "necromancer, in front of me; I hold the casting—"

She had parted the waters, marking a dry path through the underground river. It was a better plan than to simply hope to push the ghouls into the water.

"I think we can r-run," Khalid said, stuttering but not afraid; his great skill almost opposite to his gentleness of character. There was a brief pause before the first move—Montaron, in fact, was earliest to obey Jaheira's orders, turning to follow the path she had made. Prudence and Khalid did the same, running from the ghouls; to the mud of the riverbed, expecting the pursuit.

The path between the waters was the width of a tall human's armspan, dampened by mud that clung to her boots. Prudence stood in the middle of it, sheets of rising waters upon either side, raised and kept there by casting, as a stilled waterfall.

The ghouls seemed to hesitate at the bank. They had brought an enemy to a site for the battle of their choosing; and here at the end—

"I cannot hold the casting for an eternity," Jaheira said, upon the other side; "cross—"

Ghouls had no mind to be prompted by taunts; —as if she and the others had not already bled, did not already smell of it. Prudence raised her left hand in the thick strap of her shield, flexed her glove from her palm, and cut; a slight injury. The fresh blood she flicked in the ghouls' direction; and they came to the path of the floodwaters, after prey. Five paces away, four paces, three and they were upon the river's floor, two bending to taste at the red on the ground; then Khalid left, running for the opposite bank, the undead in chase—

She was soaked from her waist down, clambering late above the river's border; but the waters swept over where the ghouls had been. Flesh destroyed by the ongoing tides, water passing over their bodies and dissolving to a more usual rest— Khalid, similarly half-drenched, sat by her on the bank. A clawed dead hand reached up from the water, for a long moment, as if it sought to wound one final time, and fell down below the dark waves.

Imoen released a long breath. "It's... _unnatural_ here," she said, borrowing Jaheira's word. "I hate those—those things..." Jaheira, behind her, quietly rested a hand on her shoulder; and that strength seemed to Prudence to help her sister.

"We must find what sent them," Jaheira said.

From the flickering tinder, this place was a wide cavern near the flow of the underground river; there were shadows upon the ragged rocks and dark patches of the high ceiling, and Prudence stared as carefully as she could in case of spiders. Nothing moved, and Jaheira seemed confident enough. Xzar held the flare in his left hand, sitting on the river's shore, his knees curled into his chest.

"Did the potion work?" Prudence asked. "Are you still injured?" He'd gone quiet; she slowly reached out a hand toward him. "We're going to move from here. Probably a bad idea to stay somewhere that smells so much like kobold." She sniffed the air.

"Those were wraith spiders," Xzar said, whispering; "They give them a taste for dead flesh and make them halfway between." His voice rose to high-pitched tones, almost a shriek. "And ghouls and ghasts; they want to eat you and I want to know how to _eat them right back_ —"

Sometimes Jaheira could express a lot with a few words; and sometimes she could express the same by a single look. It was a great gift of the succinct.

"But my head hurt when I tried, I kept trying with the fangs in me. That's why, that's why you need to change your mind, so it doesn't hurt any more and you make them leave you alone..." The plight of a mage with mental reserves exhausted. Xzar closed his eyes and shook his head, and when he spoke again he was calmer. "Anyway, if you'd explained you wanted some blood, Rue, you had only to ask me to give it." He shook a silver vial that contained something that sloshed inside it.

"Cutting oneself is a...j-just a _touch_ m-melodramatic," Khalid said cheerily, and perhaps slightly unfairly for a man whose wife regularly called loudly for Nature to take the life she gave. "How are your healing spells, d-dearest?"

"You have found yourself in quite enough trouble," Jaheira said, moving to rest a hand just below her husband's shoulder, looking into his face. The two shared a private glance and smile that made Prudence stare quickly away, to avoid any intrusion of that intimacy between them.

The group moved on within the darkness; there was waste in corners of the cavern, a few small bones with signs of gnawing, crudely shaped devices of stone, scraps of human-made cloth.

"A kobold dwelling," Jaheira said. It was deserted; perhaps they had already fought its usual inhabitants. Only one small group of kobolds had been left behind to guard it, and those Jaheira took with a casting of entanglement, warning that her ability to cast drained. Down further paths, amidst the twisting of the low caverns, they came to a grey wall stained by markings.

"Necromancer, hand me the light," Jaheira ordered impatiently; she took the mundane tinder with a firm grasp, and held it steadily before the dark patterns.

Prudence examined the drawings with the others under the rippling firelight; they seemed vivid, recent. In the centre was a large, crudely drawn figure, given a mossy colour to what was probably its face, perhaps wearing dark grey armour; small scaled-down figures painted using a material that looked like old blood danced around it, presumably meant to represent kobolds. The central figure stood with outstretched arms and wide legs, bearing a dark spiked rod in its right hand. Signs of bloodstains and burned material lay on the ground before it.

"Not exactly Lyonhardus of Iljak," Imoen muttered.

"A kobold deity," Prudence guessed. It did not resemble Kurtulmak; his motif was a skull-on-black-on-bloodstain, she remembered. There were at least two other kobold gods, 'Gaknulak' of trapping and 'Daklamak'—or something of the sort, an exarch of Kurtulmak; in Candlekeep's library it would have been easy to hunt through the works on reptilian theology. "Not any I've read of."

"It carries the—the world's overbright candle in black—" Xzar pointed to a dark spot on the large figure's waist: an irregularly shaped black area that might have passed for a stain on the rock, a lighter stain overlaid on it. His arm shook, and a note of fear was carried in his voice.

Jaheira looked dubious. "A simple splotch. I would say at least that the green skin bespeaks an ogre or orc of some variety; halfbreed, no doubt."

Xzar's hand was raised to his mouth, his nails bitten nervously. "No! I know the Dark Sun when I see it, I do—it's very bad, they're chasing you, chasing all of us—" He looked ready to flee; Prudence stepped closer to him. "Say the name and they hear you! They come after you—isn't possible a trick, not by choice working for this, Monty, there's no great plan for that—"

"For Mask's sake shut your mouth, damned madman," Montaron said, unaffected by the image, his arms folded impatiently.

"Then if it is a part-ogre or orc masquerading as a kobold deity," Prudence said—which would explain the facts adequately enough, she thought; "a cleric; then we'll need spells that can disrupt casting—"

"If it is not a simple spot," Jaheira said.

"A caster of some sort, if that's what the kobolds follow," Prudence said. "You'd want arcane or divine abilities to pretend to be a deity, and if you're a priest, then Cy—" Xzar made a short, pained noise, rocking back and forth on his feet. "—Then that particular deity's more tolerant of such blasphemy than most." The Mad God, the Lord of Three Crowns: Cyric. He had risen from mortal to god by taking much of the power of the Dead Three in the Time of Troubles, with authority in the domains of Bane's tyranny, Myrkul's death, Bhaal's murder, and his own madness.

"Indeed, m-many find strong reason to fear that god," Khalid said. That was certainly true; in none of the books in the main library of Candlekeep was Cyric praised, only in a scant few of the restricted volumes...

"When they're as afraid of their own shadows as ye," Montaron said; a grave underestimation of Khalid.

"There's reason, I tell you!" Xzar snapped. "All of them are that way! They want you, they want everything, they play knucklebones with your soul and they think they own you and keep the world and it's not true that principles wouldn't work without them, that's why they take us and keep us locked up with heavy keys and feed—"

"This representative of a god," Prudence said, "has lost already, by his own efforts alone." She spoke over Xzar, looking at him; he met her eyes, and lowered his hand slightly from his mouth. "Either he was a fool to start with, or he has lost control over his servants by degrees."

Imoen snorted. "Yeah, the spiders and the ghouls and the tough kobold archers with the flaming arrows are _very out of control_ all right."

"No. He's failed," Prudence said. It was confidence she did not feel herself; but the reasoning held. "The miners—" That man called Joseph; the others who had died in this crisis. "The kobolds attacking people at all is a fail. They had only to poison the mine and remain out of sight. That's what I'd have had them do, if my object was to ruin Nashkel with this plan. Not hurt anyone." Xzar was silent, listening.

"Ye've missed a crucial-aspect-of-your-analysis," Montaron mocked: "Not everyone's a goody-goody." He was quite right.

"—Because it's the killing that brought adventurers here," she said. "Emerson would have assumed a defect in the mines themselves. A natural iron plague."

"Ah. Go on," Montaron said.

"At the very least, I'd have made the bodies disappear," Prudence said; Imoen looked as repulsed at the concept as anyone would be. "If I were as unscrupulous as this person, of course. That would leave it open to believe that the miners ran away for reasons of their own. Or then I'd try and lay the blame on Emerson himself; I can't believe he's not ashamed to walk around in those expensive red clothes and jewellery given that his workers are in rags and loincloths, under deadly peril, and earning only a pittance even when the mines operate—"

Jaheira sighed. "If you were causing an iron crisis, child, then I'd rather you not explain your plan in such wordy detail."

"Er—indeed," Prudence said. "Shall we confront this entity, and explain why he shouldn't?"

Xzar nodded; for some reason, a mad smile spread across his face, and he jauntily adjusted the light pack he carried to walk onward.

—

In the centre of the underground lake was a grey cave, a narrow entrance, accessed only by a bridge of stone that ran to it. Jaheira sniffed disapprovingly; they stood over dead bodies of kobolds, their supplies of healing potions used, Imoen's left sleeve burned to fall loosely around her arm.

Prudence felt a difference in the atmosphere, and looked at Jaheira to see if the druid perceived the same; Jaheira scowled, and it seemed that she measured the same thing by her own divine patronage. There was a stench of decay in the air, but there was more beyond it that was sensed by other than nose and mouth. Something wrong, something she might call evil, or else diametrically opposed to what she held faith in, Prudence thought; something that to deliberately open her senses to would hurt and ruin any sort of readiness for a fight. As if some subconscious instinct sought a deliberately mundane metaphor, the uneasiness expressed itself in her body as the regular cramps that were relieved as a secondary purpose of nara-root tea. If there were a particularly likely place for an active cleric of ill intent...

"This," Jaheira said; they had travelled some distance beyond the limits of the map Montaron carried, and the lake seemed the effective end of the mines. "I feel the unnature of a presence; you ought also to know it." Prudence nodded in assent. "This is where the offence to the Balance springs from." She tapped her staff once on the stone ground; it did not break before her. "I would call a brief rest, within that deserted cave we passed earlier. It would be sensible to pray for castings with that goal in mind; there is enough disturbance that to prepare is wiser."

Prudence leaned against the cavern's wall, seated, her armour dried and proofed against rust from its dousing. Jaheira knelt, speaking in a low voice to Silvanus; Xzar studied his spellbook by a white, fatty-looking candlestick, talking to himself. She prayed; it was necessary to rest and meditate to renew casting strength, restore healing.

 _We near the domain of possibly-a-half-ogre-Cyricist; this is the path I prayed to walk. I pray that we will serve by ending this; that there will be no deaths further. That I might regain healing and protection against evils. That I can pursue duty to accomplish this; that I can protect others..._

There were shallow dreams; half-dark, as if she could wake any moment by the choosing, on some border between consciousness and the complex, tangling subconscious.

The towers of Candlekeep. A light shone in the window of her old room, a magelight cantrip that faded into the candles she had needed ever since she had been sanctioned upon this path. Prudence watched its glimmer as if she were a bird with a cross-sectioned view of the fortress, floating somewhere high in the air. The very bricks closed over the light, as if the walls themselves conspired to keep her at bay. She saw it fade, slowly; and then found herself standing on the road in the dark of the night she had left Candlekeep. Where Gorion had died. She saw the appearance of her father, a faded spectre of his true self. Even in dreams he was dead.

 _You cannot go back this way, child_ , he said; but she had known that already, and he was only an echo of the parent she had loved. Two paths ran through the blackness of the wood; one smooth, the second overgrown and thorned, and it was the second that promised interest. She took a step upon it, willing to traverse its difficult turns and byways.

A voice distinct to that of her father whispered. Taunted: _Do you imagine you have the strength?_ she heard spoken in her ear. _You, who faced no challenge, who became easily what you are?_

She would rather face an accusation than avoid it, or so she wished to do so. It was almost true. She'd the benefit of Sir Rolland at Candlekeep, that the old knight had chosen to retire with his friend Tamas of Oghma; and sheer nepotism that her father had known Hvaltha of Eldath from his days as an adventurer and that she had visited.

The peace of Candlekeep's grounds were as yet not far behind. She saw still the wooden quintains she knew each splinter of, memories of cheerful camaraderie with Erik and Jondalar and Hull and all the others in the practice field alike; and turned once more to the road bordered by barbed thorns. She would claim that she had worked for years, trained out of countless weaknesses, devoted tendays to learning a single form of a blade's movement, forsworn other studies to read all she could of healing and strategy and theology. She had laboured in the Watchers until without exception she had defeated all of them in practice matches, not by natural strength but by long hours of work and careful tactics. None of that entitled a claim to be a paladin, only divine grace—but she had been slightly above the average age when she was granted the abilities of the role, it had not been entirely easy—

The path through the dark woods was rocky and sharp, and a monstrous vision lay within it.

 _You are afraid that you are a coward. You are weak_ , that dark voice murmured, a quiet rustle in the depths of her mind.

The yellow-eyed giant of a man; she feared him. He was stronger than her, far stronger... _But of course I am mortal and I gain the strength of the service; for the future I can only pray and therefore fearing fear itself can do no possible good—_

Again, that vestigial corner, that black voice of the underside of her mind. _Can you call yourself a paladin for sacrificing nothing? You craved this, craved adventure and exploration; you joy in physical expression. You have done nothing more virtuous than follow your own inclinations and lusts._

 _I'd hardly be a better paladin if I dreamed of a small farm and raising children instead of travelling the realms—_ she thought. _I do not need to desire such a life to protect it for others; I wanted this; I still do_ — she spoke against the dream-voice, with something of defiance. There was misery and death. On this path they rose in smoke like the fraction of an iceberg above waves of sorrow, only a sampling of what could be expected to come. Gorion; the miner of the greenstone ring; the halfling messenger; the other adventurers that had come to the mines. Pain for their loss; the pain of wounds she had known, the burning of an arrow under her ribs; pain and agony that her sister, that her other companions, might fall. The fierce excitement of motion, of fighting.

 _I still desire to follow this. I still try to act in duty—_

She could not believe in coincidence entire; that both sets of travelling-companions had wished this cause was a sign of what she followed, and there was proof that it was a right thing to do. Candlekeep was far behind and the steep path continued to open before her. She walked past dark thorns.

 _You will learn_ , it whispered.

She woke to something tugging on her like one of Reevor's dogs gnawing on a rat.

—

Onion metaphor: CS Lewis.


	5. Chapter 5

The silhouette above her in the dark was Imoen shaking her, and she came rather groggily to alertness.

"Hey! Pru, wake up. Get up!"

Prudence passed her arm across her eyes; she did not often dream. It hadn't been a nightmare, only a disorganised recollection of what she already knew.

"'S your turn on watch, Jaheira and the necromancer're still sleepy," Imoen said. "And you were talking in your sleep besides, I heard Mr G.'s name, and you were shaking. Place giving you the creeps too?"

"Not really." Despite the harsh stone at their backs, if anything she felt invigorated, ready in mind and body to fight. Travel itself had not come reluctantly to her, and perhaps the dream was a simple reminder that they could only go forward.

"Must've been some dream," Imoen said.

"Nothing particularly dramatic." She'd never been told that she talked in her sleep, either. No complicated plot of knights and intrigue nor extraplanar creatures bleeding unearthly fluid; a half-conscious recounting of recent events, pursued by uncomfortable voicings. "Get some rest yourself before we do this, Im."

Prudence stood near the cave's narrow mouth, and stretched; this place was some distance removed from the cave upon the underground lake, its opening relatively concealed from even those with night's vision. Whether it was morning or evening in the world outside she could not tell. Dwarves and drow possessed their own ways of measuring time in their underground lives; an instinct lacked by humans. But she was not afraid of the dark itself, nor of the underground. That which required more caution would be the living enemies here.

She worked the stiffness of sleep from her muscles, at a slow and easy pace; and then drew on her chainmail, as quietly as she could. Outside the cave it was dark and grey, with no sounds of unwelcome interruption. Khalid snored lightly behind her, Montaron more deeply. She stood silently to watch, as if it were a guard's duty of Candlekeep; it was more interesting to work or read than to remain still, though she'd enough practice of using it for prayer and thought. The dreams were far different to that transcendent moment human ability couldn't properly remember, where she had woken up and discovered that she could heal people by touch; but for now she was as prepared as she could be. She waited, slightly cold, and behind her the mage woke from his own memorisations and preparations.

Xzar didn't trouble with anything resembling a 'Good morning', or afternoon or night or when it actually was. "You dreamed," he said, in a normally-modulated voice; "You'd nightmares; I heard it."

"Not nightmares, and not really your purview," she replied.

Though he was in shadowed silhouette, she thought that Xzar contrived to look gravely insulted. "Of course they are!" he protested. "I am a wizard—the nighttime visions of our companions are the stuffs of divinations and amateur psychology. What strange and elaborately metaphorical sights were you granted to illustrate your hidden and twisted depths?"

"That we couldn't return to Candlekeep via imagery of the very place. My hidden depths mustn't be fond of elaborately metaphorical sights," Prudence said.

"Oh." He paused, apparently nonplussed; then his voice brightened again, in preparation of one of his absurd theories. "It must mean something complicated about what you ate before going to sleep. Perhaps you're allergic to dry bread, your library symbolizes its walls and baking time and it's not impossible to make pages out of flour, is it?"

"I...wouldn't think it likely," she said. "Have you dreamed lately, diviner?"

"Yes. Of you."

That—hadn't been expected.

"You wore spiky armour with points on most parts of it," Xzar continued with enthusiasm, "under a dark blue sky at night on the top of a tower, and threw a knight off a balcony railing in the rain, and then glowing blood fell from him and filled the earth in impressive apocalyptic splendour like a flood and that was the general size and shape of the thing. You were much bigger, though, and you'd a beard and a different face...Also, you were a man."

She sighed in slight relief. "That's...probably not me at all, Xzar." The blood, though; not a pleasant thought. _Spiked armour—not...?_ Still, there was a certain dearth of balconies below a mine.

"Hmm. A point worth considering," he said. "Don't take muscle-expanding drugs or find one of those tricky Nether Scrolls, unless you want to. Do you have any thoughts on spikes?"

"That they get in the way if you plan to fight alongside others," Prudence said.

"Never thought of that. Ought to pass it on to Monty, if he wishes to know," Xzar said. "Sometimes it's a slate-coloured mist in those dreams," he continued, more meditatively, speaking in his fluid tenor. "Not the stars shining through bright red; the slate-coloured fog that stifles everything. I remember someone who saw too far into the planes around and under and through and past everything; and they locked her up, and she still saw too far. What happened after that, at least it was still there to understand. Adia, was her name? Aphid? Slatemists, where there's nothing to dream about."

"Someone you used to know?" she said. A sad tale, in its fragments.

He shook his head fiercely, a shadow moving in the dark. "Why in the planes ought I to recall quaint immaterial fictions a very long time ago? Arhyme saw the footprints crowded by the countless others of the same place, and back then it mattered less that they could look. Then I was an apprentice; then the time when magic was free; then she of mysteries returned to everyone."

Quite young to start an apprenticeship. "You worked for another necromancer?" she said.

"Oh, I learned a good deal," Xzar said. "My mother was a powerful lich since before I was born, of course—it's important to use whatever you can do, what you have to look after things. I am become death, destroyer of towers with thorns of black festering ice, of course!" he said, almost cheerily; and whistled easily.

"And my mother was from the plane of very tall gnomes," Prudence said. The problems with that implied timeline—

He inclined his head to the left. "You don't really have the nose for it."

"G-good...ah, my wife will know when it is," Khalid said, rising from his thin bedroll. "Not far beyond evening above ground, I should say." Clerics of most of the darker deities chose to pray to renew their castings at night; a useful time to select to make an attack.

"You're used to such dark dungeons?" Prudence said; Khalid could probably see a smile through the shadows.

He chuckled nervously. "Nobody—I s-suppose nobody ever really can be used to it."

"I like being six feet under," Xzar said happily; Khalid seemed to decide to ignore him.

"Jaheira did f-feel it to be a caster," Khalid said; "you do know the mind-shielding patterns, Prudence? It can be a d-difficult thing for swordsmen—I know m-myself that sirines have charmed me in the past."

"I've studied them, yes," she said; in addition to faith's protections Gorion's lessons had helped her understanding. "Either—a much-narrowed focus upon a single goal, I think, or such a complicated contextual awareness that intrusion cannot dominate."

"I like to imagine a s-shield that covers me, plain and grey," Khalid said, "and also it is t-true feelings; I suppose I am always charmed by a lovely druid."

Jaheira was behind them.

"Or it helps to _know how to cast spells of the school_ ," Xzar said, "arcanists are even better at it than silly god-toadies of especially silly unhinged candle-blacked gods who aren't going to do anything to us tonight, and if you can do it then you get to be less afraid of it, and...It is a school of intricate casting," he lectured, "as the fine work of a needle rather than invocation's overly simplistic hammer or abjuration's thick bucklers."

"And a s-school...like necromancy...that 'tis very easy to m-misuse," Khalid said.

"But most of my components are all-natural," Xzar said; a reply intended for Jaheira, squabbling.

"Your disruption spells don't need any components, do they?" Prudence said. "And no more raising undead, especially if it's a priest."

"For myself I have petitioned Silvanus for silenced throats of those in opposition, among other means to strike enemies with natural force," Jaheira said, with great firmness (and, perhaps, forbearance).

"And are we to sit around with tea-party chitchat until we drop of old age, or go to make something dead?" Montaron spoke, quickly upon his feet.

—

She ran with Khalid through the hail of arrows. Fire bursting against their shields, suppressed by Jaheira's enchantment—there was reason to fear nonetheless, but that had to be turned into motion, granted to run swift and sure to where the guards waited—

The magelight burst to a vivid green shine; the kobolds certainly knew of their presence now, one hit and falling by Imoen's arrows.

Prudence pushed herself to the task, striving to make them drop their bows; she saw Khalid's shield hand clench the pouch, the small damp seeds spill upon the ground, and then they heard Jaheira's chant. The vines sprang smoothly up, a tight entanglement; she and Khalid killed kobolds—sliced into scaled flesh like meat on a platter, small creatures dying in the service of their false deity—and the ghouls came.

These pair were quite powerful; unnaturally strong, the ability to freeze others in place by a slash of their claws; not brought down by the usage of Imoen's remaining supply of the arrows of kobolds likewise serving their master. But it was a dwelling shielded by a makeshift water moat; and Khalid was an artist in the grace of his sword, easily tempting the one he fought too close to the edge and allowing it to overreach and fall.

The stone crumbled, there; a ground's weakness; the ghouls were creations of the same entity, the same underlying pattern of motion to their ravening hunger. Prudence managed to step aside, allow the ghoul's weight to rest on the unstable part; unbalance the rock herself by slamming the edge of her shield to the ground. Jaheira had caught up, her skin thick bark, her quarterstaff held with a bear's strong grip; she and Khalid would take point.

 _They know, of course, that we are here._ The entrance was not wide, and dark. A physical miasma hit them like a blow: dark smoke that hung thickly in the air, sickly perfume, rotting food and flesh, waste, sulphur, charcoal, burned alchemy. Something cast, something communed with a strong black presence, something that might be so easy to see if she allowed it through, might take over her vision and blindingly ache; rational knowledge was more true than feelings of darkness but it was as a paladin she _knew_ —

The magelight flew behind them. Three tunnels, seven kobolds within the first wielding swords, narrow darkness the second, the third a wide cavern, a trace of firelight in the back, glint of small metal device, carpeted floor three smaller rugs gold and green one large black, wall hangings with metal rings on metal rods, red one thick cloth purple one thinner already ripped from three rings, broad large figure rising from darkness bearing the dark holy symbol, bolted shelf with nine bottles two glass, thronelike chair, _Cyric is god over trickery illusion destruction death chaos what spells_ , an instant to be aware of it.

Jaheira and Khalid went forward; Montaron to the left, the kobold guardians.

A voice from the figure; necessary to disrupt potential spellcaster. Hands to crossbow. "Tazok must have dispatched you! My traitorous kobolds—"

A name there; the half-orc was speaking, wearing armour glinting where not blackened, dark sun at thick waist. Bolt loaded—

"I am Mulahey, but I cheated him not! Kill the intruders, minions! Never take anything—" Objects the size of short thick logs he held, scattered on the ground; darkness of him intensified. "No, leave one! Elfblood to match—"

Bolt released; torso, more reliable than head, impact on armour; and skeletons springing, before Khalid and Jaheira, behind intermingled between kobolds, growing quickly from grey rock like strange trees. Yellow; bones shaped to claws; skulls leering.

The half-orc chanted again; Khalid and Jaheira sought to reach him.

"He's _powerful_ —" Prudence got out; "Imoen, Xzar, for him—" Perhaps a match for Jaheira, given his time to entrench here—

It took time to exchange crossbow for weapon and shield; a lot of skeletons, she and Montaron keeping them back. Fighting summoned creatures, she thought, failing to reach the caster himself the key to it all; but that was the job of the Harpers. Prudence cut across a skeleton's spine; the bones chattered and moved even despite separation, and there were more rising, a small army of walking dead.

She saw Xzar, casting. A rainbowed twist between his fingers, flung like a dart, magic sending it to its path. Imoen, aiming arrows at the kobolds near to Khalid and Jaheira, trying to aid the clearing of their path, careful against hitting them. Montaron hit a skeleton's knees, and she blocked its retaliation by pushing scimitar against its hands, its bared metacarpals reaching to tear still. Then he went left to stab a kobold against reaching Xzar, she right against a skeleton that could have reached Imoen.

It was not fear that governed her, shielding against the skeletons, their mass large in number but unimpressive by individual. Nor anger, the miasma of the Cyricist himself palpable, cramping pain if she allowed it.

 _Perhaps—I start to know what I'm doing_ —

She could fix coldly upon the placings of each person. Imoen, trying to cast from that cloak. Xzar next to her, both back from the attacking minions. Khalid and Jaheira in the forefront, striking ever closer to the cleric himself. She and Montaron, moving forward, pushing their enemies to the mouth of the narrow tunnel: to face only a few at a time. The skeleton of a human was vulnerable in spine, joints, neck; a kobold was vulnerable to an attack from above on its skull, or shoulder or torso. She was practised enough that the movements of her weapon came before a thought was full-formed, unsettling though it was to face these undead. Block; strike. The key was for Jaheira and Khalid to fight through; secondary, for Imoen and Xzar to use their abilities, and to keep them alive meanwhile. Keep all of them alive.

Mulahey spoke in a language she did not know, bass-pitched and harsh in sound, and Xzar was not slow with his spells; the energy drain materialised between his hands, white and cutting the caster mid-syllable. The Cyricist growled, spoke again. Khalid and Jaheira cut easily enough through his servants, but there were many of them and Jaheira was too closely pressed to attempt a spell.

"It works!" Imoen called, gesturing with the swirling pink cloak; a kobold ahead, turning to watch her. Useful subversion— "Attack, my kobold friend!"

"Jaheira needs to get through," Prudence called; out of the corner of her eye she saw Imoen nod, saw Montaron sever a skeleton's kneecaps. Her sister would move that which she was charming; in her mind she saw that effect upon the battle—

Dead kobolds on the ground; bones in piles of skeletons subdued, some turning to dust by their destruction. Mulahey called upon his deity Cyric, and this time Xzar's attempts did not interrupt him.

It wasn't a visible attack, though darkness seemed to pass before her eyes as a sudden splash of black grease. She heard Jaheira's sharp hawklike cry, Khalid's brief stutter; then felt her own stagger, as if the casting had been released in some ever-expanding radius, black smooth cords tightening around her head and Montaron grunting, Imoen's soft gasp and Xzar's shriek.

 _...everyone you hate will die at your hands or everyone you love will die at your hands the immortal destruction the black illusion of the labyrinth..._

She had prayed for protection on all of them and she was herself; the skeleton's sharp fingerbones lashing to her cheek. She knew of the reality of Khalid and Jaheira facing the Cyricist and of Montaron beside her, her sister and Xzar fighting the same presence, the shapes of the small bodies underfoot; of everything she could see and knew was tangible and there, any advantage she could think—

A second was far too long a distraction in a fight. She'd stepped back; the skeleton's clawing raked down across her mail; then she moved forward, pushing them back by shield.

" _Out can't try that out of my head AWAY FROM ME!_ " Xzar cried out. He stumbled back, frightened; Imoen stood steady; and Montaron's movement had slowed and his blade pointed in the wrong direction.

It wasn't as if Montaron fought in his right mind; too slow. "Im—" Prudence called, thrusting her shield sharply forward to stop him, and her sister nodded quickly, her face pale but determined;

"You're my new best friend, right, Monty?" Imoen gestured—a blackness seemed to depart from Montaron's face, perhaps not long before he would have stabbed one of his allies. " _Right_ , Monty?"

His blade was lowered, and he shook his head as if to clear it of strong alcohol; Prudence felt a skeleton's hand rip along the chainmail upon her forearm. Harsh danger, pain, the _Cyricist_ —

"I'll kill ye later, kid," Montaron grunted, back to fight on their side. Jaheira and Khalid, unaffected; and at last Mulahey the Cyricist shouted out, Khalid's blade seeking joints in his plate, Jaheira's staff bludgeoning him through it.

Five skeletons; three kobolds, before them in the tunnel's mouth. If Mulahey had further kobold reinforcement he would have called upon it. He shouted again, and Jaheira's answering battlecry was fierce. Clattering bones fell around Prudence from Montaron's grim stab, separating kneecaps. Four skeletons. Leering, yellowed skulls for faces. She struck between the spinal cord's eight and ninth vertebrae of the one before her; it fell, and she could crack open the skull with the base of her shield.

" _Cyric_ ," Mulahey called, and Prudence could block away the feeling of it, fix her mind on what lay before her instead—" _your darkness to hide your servant_ —"

She was blind. They all were; Montaron swore, Jaheira called Silvanus' name. Tangible and suffocating in its form, her nose and mouth and eyes blocked without relief as if by foul-tasting ink forced into her, black oil taken from the glands of a long-dead animal, his god's power manifested by this imprisonment.

 _Couldn't stop, anything but not stop_ — She brought shield and blade forward, where Montaron hadn't been; hit, perhaps wounded what was there, and where Mulahey would be—

"I can't see," Imoen said, sounding surprised as if she were a child once more, bewilderment and the same fear as all of them in her voice.

 _The least protected of course Mulahey will be_ there _—_

Prudence stepped back; the picture should have been in her mind to call upon, the spot where the rugs ended, the patterns of the brown-grey pebbles on the ground before the hollowed-out portion of the wall were Imoen and Xzar were, the distance—once Obe had given her a blindfold to fight with, though this was nothing like—Jaheira's light footfall and Khalid's slightly heavier run, scalemail clinking; bones creaking, chasing her, Montaron's cry to fix the blindness. Then something else. Darkness was a friend to those of certain deities.

She knew where her body was, and stepped forward. Her scimitar met plate metal on a high back, and not leather or wizard's robe; she sought the chain joints. A smell of filthy breath, and she whirled back and hoped that the sound of the morningstar whistling through the darkness was indeed meant for her—

She heard Imoen's gasp, the sound of movement mercifully away from her direction.

Laughter. " _Tazok would hardly use you, blind human_." The voice gave her a target; she lunged with arm outstretched, ready to take the reprisal. At his joints the plate was joined by weaker chain, but there was no way to aim at that—

Mulahey was close to her, moving past her attack; she flung herself back at the moment she hit thin air instead of where he ought to have been, but the spikes hit her right shoulder. Unbroken; she moved with the blow, falling away from it. She was foolishly hiding behind her shield as if it were a carapace, trying to imagine what she would do, where he would be; Khalid and Jaheira fought something, somewhere behind her. Right-handed, aggressive; sooner or later another blow—. She went left for him, quickly. Again her blade skidded across metal and she darted beyond him, running. _Until Jaheira and Khalid_ —

" _Fleeing, knight_?" she heard the voice—and he thought he could _toy_ with them, somehow, his mind unhinged as his master and that was no comfort of incapacity nor did she wish to sense more of the malevolent force behind him—and the quick sound of rattling bones and then a skeleton behind her. There were bone fingers around her neck, strangling her in her blindness. She flung herself back to where the wall ought to be—bodyweight far above skeleton despite its magical strength, smashing it to pieces—but Mulahey would—

"It's very unfair to leave us in the dark like this," she heard Xzar's voice, composed and relatively lucid; and then she saw his light. The spider eyes, twelve of them, bright and glittering in streamed, lit trails and flows across the prismed facets of the spiders who saw colours in the dark, glowing like the eyes of a pictured peacock's tail behind him.

Jaheira: "...at last he achieves something of use to the group..." she muttered, and a skeleton grasping her quickly fell. She called Silvanus' name once more, and the bark of her skin thickened and grew, covering over sap that had run from it in two wide streams.

Mulahey stood close to Xzar and his lights. "Tazok! What makes you think we don't know of him—" Prudence called, making an assumption of gender; she briefly touched her shoulder while she still could, healing the wound with a quick prayer—

" _Tazok never sent you, and you won't get me_ —"

Mulahey barrelled toward her, and she could not retreat from him; he snarled, and quickly she knew that he'd been overconfident with them in their blindness, that he'd strength and skill Prudence only hoped was borrowed by a cleric's arts. The joint of his right elbow had been left open by Khalid, mail flapping loose, and she tried to aim for it. The half-orc growled, changed the direction of his mace mid-air—a faster trick than any of his other movements, too fast for her—and easily disarmed her. The scimitar clattered to the ground—not far from her—

Only a second's worth needed. Mulahey's eyes were red in the weird light, the Black Sun raised in his left hand. The ripped purple hanging was at her back; she tore it from its remaining rings, threw the cloth, and with a grunt Mulahey pulled it down from his face. Enough time that Jaheira threw down a skeleton assailing her, and flew forward, deer-swift. Before even that was a cry from Mulahey. When the Cyricist turned, he struck something that fell away from him; Montaron and his bloodied sword flew to the opposite wall of the cavern.

 _Yes. Heal him_ — Imoen was by Khalid, her bow drawn as if to celebrate the return of sight in the darkness, and an arrow bloomed in the chest of a kobold across the cavern. Montaron was standing, bleeding but less so than Mulahey, his blade still ready; Prudence went quickly for that, best to end the loss of blood. Deeply wounded—Montaron's toughness had to be respected as she healed him. Fewer servants remaining, the Cyricist fighting, crying phrases in an orc's language that to Prudence had the familiar cadences of a healing spell even as Jaheira's staff constantly hit.

"I will blind you in return, _orqu—"_ she threatened.

Prudence heard rather than saw them, in her own fight; Mulahey laughed amidst his grunts of pain, and his voice commanded dark syllables even as Jaheira asked for her own boon. Xzar screamed some incoherent phrase of warning and flung himself flat on the ground moments before the effect took place. The blue fire scorched from Mulahey's dark sun, through Jaheira's barked chest, and beyond.

 _Lightning bolt_ —

It sheared through the one-fine material of the tapestries and cloth of the wall, ricocheted from the shelf and through a skeleton's ribcage. A spell that was _not_ supposed to be cast indoors; Prudence threw herself to the ground, saw the skeleton by her unharmed by it— _no reason why lightning shouldn't sear bone, protection, then_ —they listened to Mulahey's insane laughter, waited for the impossibly fast trajectory—Khalid was in front of Imoen, protecting her, and Jaheira lay fallen on her back and yet spoke the final phrases of her druid's incantation, hoarse-voiced but unfailing. In the split seconds of trying to keep down from the blue tide there was thought— _only_ time to try to think, cold and spinning.

 _Lightning is not directly within Cyric's domain and one who can cast and protect skeletons from it works with—_

Dry bones fell to the ground from Mulahey's hands and in the midst of the lightning four fresh-risen skeletons walked. The shelf was to her right, _a wish that a poison brewer distilled protections he cast—_ Prudence swept the potions from the shelf, no time for finesse—Gorion had kept the kind for invocation trials and she knew the signs—the smell distinct ( _if not a secret poison_ ) of wet hair and rusting iron, the liquid dark purple, absorption. She drank and tested empirically by standing and waiting for the turn of the path. The lightning hit as a blinding physical blow, and left her standing, shaking by static. Mulahey screamed: his eyes were black, by the insects that crawled across them and sunk down multiple legs and fangs. Jaheira's chant turned to healing upon herself.

 _Only four this time. He loses resources and he is blind_ —Prudence told herself. The weight of her blade, from a high strike, carried it through to pass through bone. She stepped through the skeletons to their master.

He was blind and she could see, this time; he'd that carapace of dented plate, that orc's strength. His heavy morningstar lashed through the air; she moved aside. The undead pursued her, and Imoen's pink wand flared a missile behind her. Xzar whispered, but that might have been simply to maintain the light.

Jaheira and Montaron had both wounded Mulahey. Prudence slashed at his upper right arm, where the platemail was dented. It was the bruising that Jaheira had left behind; in his pain she could think of Mulahey as something animalistic and his hurt madness with none of what separated sapient mind from beast, most importantly something that was trying to kill them all—

Or, to think so coldly about him, so carefully trying to hook the point of her blade between his plate's joints, to exploit Jaheira's bruises that he hadn't had the chance to heal. Better that than to react to that form of power gathered around him, mind on the fight and the undead that lurked behind. Blindly the morningstar sped again through the air, and in a reversal it was she to easily avoid. The motion turned both of them, such that it was he closer to the skeletons he had raised, closer to Khalid approaching. She could see the others easily, her back to the entrance.

Imoen's wand released another missile. It hit the back of Mulahey's neck, and he staggered forward. He shouted, his blind eyes rolling in his face, wildly gazing; and then a crossbow bolt hit, Montaron standing with the drawn weapon. Prudence sidestepped Mulahey's flailing form, and it was no great feat of swordsmanship to finish the task of bringing him to his knees—

Like that, he looked far smaller. "I yield," he said, as the point of her scimitar reached his neck below his chin, where his skin was bare above his stained gorget, and the morningstar fell from his hands; "Give you my papers, locked chest, give mercy, I yield."

"Jaheira, silence him," Prudence said quickly, and imagined that her voice did not shake.

There was _triumph_ somewhere in him, a sick sense of rising dark bile and not before but _behind_ her—

 _It was not four skeletons that he summoned at that last time_.

Prudence turned in time, and her blade met the rusted sword of a skeleton striking at her neck, her shield smashing against its ribcage; but Mulahey rose and reached for her, his hands glowing a pale red, _when the red hands are coming for you_ —

The spell tore through her body, her face melting, her organs boiling. Mulahey's eyes were wide and healed and seeing easily, ripping her from the inside and knowing exactly what he did; and he let her drop like a tattered rag. There was a red-glowing hammer, raised, to descend once on her. Her prayer patched, began, but her mind was not enough, the divine focus drained from her—

( _but there was another inside her rising and her hands glowed a paler blue and it spread to the inside of her body, letting her live—_ )

She rolled aside, flung herself to her feet, shield discarded. It was a wild flash of instinct that she'd the knowledge that she could have repeated his red hands with that power, shaped it in the way a paladin could not; instead she healed as much as she needed to fight with—

His divine-forged hammer seemed to fly of its own will at his enemies. Her blade was ordinary metal and would be shattered by it, she remembered at the last possible moment, and instead of direct blocking stepped around him. The warhammer smashed into the wall, and where it did rocks fell with Mulahey's great strength. Like a mad bull, still inhumanly strong even in the last moments, even as Khalid moved forward. They both kept him fighting, but he did not fall again. The hammer whirled through the air like the lightning bolt he had called upon, everywhere at once, and even Khalid did not achieve more than to distract him. Cyric's borrowed power; and her _own_ energy, stolen— His last skeletons attacked, Montaron and Jaheira holding them back.

"Some have weaknesses Monty won't like," Xzar said, playing with a dark green bottle between his hands, "and some can gain interesting weaknesses."

The rust-coloured liquid flew over Mulahey's head, plastered itself to a small area three-quarters down upon his breastplate, and began to wear through it. When it reached his skin he had only to cry a few words, and the divine energy of his god sealed the wound; but that was not the purpose of the weakness.

 _An angle, a clear angle and he is vulnerable_. It could as well have been Khalid to do it, but he took Mulahey's attention by engagement with the hammer's striking, and Prudence withdrew slightly, carefully preparing to aim her cut for precision. It would have perhaps been more honourable had she thought of anything other than ending it, for she was tired.

The scimitar slashed through the gap Mulahey's own potion had rotted away, through the thick half-orc skin that protected the lower abdomen. He fell to the ground a second time, and she could not have spared him even if he had asked for it then; the blade sunk itself past his guts, and the hammer melted away from his hand. The bones fell; his heart stopped beating.

—

"I trust we are all yet hale," Jaheira said levelly; Imoen shrugged. Jaheira had cast a healing spell upon her, to cure her of scratches and scrapes of skeleton and kobold efforts. Her sister was well, Prudence told herself. One priest. In his own territory, granted, but he had been...

Jaheira bent over the corpse, turning it out efficiently, pressing Montaron away from her with an intimidating glare. "The holy symbol," she said, and carefully placed the black sun the size of her hand within a pouch on her belt, mercifully concealing it from view. "Berrun Ghastkill shall accept that as proof."

"More interesting boots," Xzar said, pointing. "Quite large, though."

"Not a repeat of stealing the very boots from the dead, if you please," Jaheira said. "He wears some metallic jewellery; but only of such a sort as to inspire mild greed. Components I do not care for. And there is this. A sickening thing."

She touched Mulahey's right hand, limp by recent death, holding it; and bent back the little finger, seeming to break it upon the corpse. Then she held a tarnished, dark ring, sized for a human thumb. "I know of these, and this is not of the Dark Sun by nature." She slowly reached for a flask hanging from her belt; she chanted, pouring water upon the ring, praying to Silvanus. The filth upon it washed away, and below it was yellow-coloured metal set with a green, flowerlike crystal, at the ring's centre a miniscule flash of brilliant red. "I purify it from its twisted use. These devices increase the mind and soul's capacity to hold divine strength, though not of my deity."

She looked in Prudence's direction. "You would hardly benefit from it as much as a cleric focused upon her calling; but Sune sponsors more paladins than she does druids. Use it."

Sune's ring flew through the air at her; it was rather pretty, but Prudence placed it in a pouch for the time being.

 _...Beauty and love are more than skin deep, based upon care for others; follow your heart to your true destination; perform a loving act each day, and seek to awaken love in others..._ The truest loves were those that faced the test of time and those which sought common good above individual longing, Prudence thought in patterns of dogma. Still in Mulahey's lair, it was not yet over.

"Magic ring of the goddess of love and beauty, Prune?" Imoen said, sanguine humour slowly returning to her voice. "Y' might want to get all those unsightly boils looked at, I'm just saying." Prudence rubbed gloved fingers along her chin, at Mulahey's damage; and looked, smiling, at her sister.

"Im, could you and Khalid check that middle tunnel, the dark one?" Prudence said. No enemies had come from it, but it might still be of interest; and she was sure that Khalid could watch over Imoen, and Imoen use her eye for traps. "Jaheira, it was damp near the upper tunnel; would you check that? And..." She looked at Montaron. "What did Mulahey leave in here?"

"Wizard, with me," Jaheira said, "there was unnatural magic in this place." She could trust that Jaheira wouldn't harm him.

"If you wish," Prudence said, "we have to make sure this cave is cleared; if anything happens call..."

"Hardly worth my time. After you and your blinding insects?" Xzar said; he scooped several bones from the ground, contentedly enough, and trailed after Jaheira's uncompromising figure.

Mulahey's footprints were wider and slightly longer than her own boots; Prudence stepped carefully in the irregular prints left on his rugs, where the way would not be trapped by whatever paranoid devices Cyricists habitually placed in their dwellings. A seat she could not refer to otherwise than as a throne, gilded, carved. Was it some unknown entrance or magic that he had transported these false luxuries by? The stench in the air testified to some form of alchemy; there ought to be some place here used for the making of his potions. There was a waste pit at the back, the smell of it worsened by all the other substances it mixed with; an obvious chest, a broken table. A wide purple hanging of heavily embroidered material was spread across one wall, and in his cautious progress through Mulahey's quarters Montaron stopped to pull it down.

Dirty crucibles and flasks lay beyond it; a waft of strong sulphur hit her like a wave dropping on her face; paraphernalia of potion-making, shafts of arrows to be altered.

"Best leave this to the mage," Montaron said impatiently. Dark green flasks of the same irregular kind as those in the kobolds' possession lay empty on the rough workbench. He went on, and severed a thin tripwire; cut through a rug not marked by footfalls, and manipulated something below it with a dagger. She saw him smile, approaching the chest. She felt the interest herself, of whatever Mulahey chose to keep locked up in this place; information of this Tazok, those it seemed had sent him upon this plot. (Now he was gone, she could say she doubted their selection practices and try to sound nonchalant about it.) A set of triple locks of apparent complication bound the thick metal band about the sturdy, long chest; she would not have liked to move it on her own.

"Think we can watch hawklike, do we?" Montaron said, sparing her a glance of—well, hostility relatively mild for him, she supposed.

"I'd the same for Imoen," Prudence declared. Quick-fingered rogues. She looked down at the metallic device not far from the chest, some sort of cross between a pipe and a lamp, a dark residue within a glass bulb. Scholars talked sometimes of consciousness-altering substances. The smell of the waste pit hit her again. "It's not possible he kept anything there?" A hiding place nobody would want to examine.

"Ye can go down first," Montaron said. Prudence looked into it—was that blood? What was _that_ dark shape? The midden was chaotically arranged, with no sign of that any normal method had been used to lessen the stench; a torn, scaled body was uppermost amongst its contents. She could see no signs of crevasses along the sides of the dank pit, and even one like Mulahey would not wish to dig amongst that waste. There was a faint hissing sound from the chest; Montaron stepped back, eyeing it. To her eyes the fastenings of it were unchanged.

"A trap?" she said; she and Imoen had heard tales from Winthrop of poisoned bolts, even fireballs materialising from wrongly opened hiding places...

"Not any more. Can't expect a god-botherer to craft something right," Montaron said, but his shoulders dropped slightly as though in relief as he returned to prying the chest open. Prudence watched him carefully. It was plain Jaheira had not trusted that the two of them together would not get the better of her in some way; likeable or not, their task with Nashkel was done.

"Do you have plans after this?" she said.

"Yep. And they're less stupid than follow-after-the-idiot-paladin. Even the wizard's not as much a fool as all that," Montaron said; he exchanged tools in his hands, working two greased pieces of metal into the lock's first part.

She'd had to spare someone claiming to surrender; and then he'd gone on to attack them further, because sometimes scorpions didn't change their natures. "Mulahey talked," Prudence said. "If we'd been able to take him alive, he'd have had more to say."

"Oh, fancy _interrogation_ practices," Montaron said. "Bit on the edge for your type, isn't it?"

"Not _that_ ," she said firmly—in Candlekeep, exposed to nothing of the sort; "people talk because it's in their nature to do so." She deliberately did not add, _A case in point_ , or _Lunatics in particular_. "They lie too, but under any circumstance."

"Yer green enough that I'm shocked you're not another druid." Montaron's lockpicks moved deftly; she heard the slight noise of metal scraping on metal.

"Less so than I was," Prudence said; the half-orc's blood was spread across her hauberk. Principle or not, it would have been her fault if Mulahey had killed any one of them in his last rampage. There was always another possibility, if one only thought in time; could have made a cut to the throat subtle enough to only stop speech, if she'd known how to do that on a half-orc; tried to break the jaw with a kick...

"Expect a bloody pat on the back for doing your job and laying-some-hands-on-me?" Montaron said. He swore at the lock.

 _No more than you for getting charmed_ —no, that would have been unfair, and less than useful. "The job's done. Analysis is relevant only so far."

A quick glare up at her, his eyebrows beetling together and his face bitter; "Ye be as irritating as the wizard by times! Don't try nothing and keep yer mouth shut."

She shrugged, her hands at her waist. One wouldn't call his hostility bluster with nothing to it, for he was capable; but with insults filtered and appeals to pragmatism, she thought that latter quality made him not ill company. After a second Montaron looked down at the lock once more.

"None of my concern when ye die of most honourable stupidity, as long as I'm not around to be dragged down by it," he said, the dire prediction supplying him an improved mood.

There were shouts behind, interrupting. Imoen's voice, raised high:

"Jaheira! Pru! Over here!"

"Come on," Prudence said; reluctantly or not, Montaron ran beside her, drawing his sword, and they returned to where Imoen called to them—

A pale-faced elf leaned down between Imoen and Khalid, his arms supported by a shoulder apiece; smeared by injury and by the mud of this place, his black eyes wide and unfocused. From the opposite direction Jaheira came jogging.

"So we found this elf up there and he needs healing," Imoen was saying, "I picked all the locks on his chains all by myself—"

Jaheira stepped forward.

—

 _I did not expect to see stars again._

The ground was more arid and dry-stoned than it had a right to be, from the dampness of that foul prison. He would rather not think upon that.

Far above him in the sky's blue-black darkness were the serene prismatics of Mystra's spray, the fan-shaped nebula of a gathering of stars yet uncounted by elvish or gnomish arts. Before he had entered underground, it had been still in retreat; it was the month of Mirtul, and in the uncaring seasons the patterns rose and fell in the skies independent of any mortal action. Humans claimed it was a sign of the goddess, that magics pleased her; that he doubted. Above there was nothing but astronomical phenomena to which majesty pitiful mortal activities could never matter. It was something of a comfort to him. There was _Auranamn_ , the Sentinel, the warrior formed by nine blazing stars; the pentamerous string of Corellon's Tears; the blue light of Deep Sashelas and its companions Tilvadar and Tambaun; _Y'landrothiel_ and its calm guidance to travellers; _Y'tellarian_ in its cold grey distance, faint to even an elven naked eye. Beyond him their endless passage of order and light through the dark sky had begun far before his life, and would continue long after his inevitable death.

His Moonblade had not left his hands since he had reclaimed it, though its light was dampened by the need to avoid undesired observation. Monsters lurked in these lands, one of the reasons for his sending; humanoid banditry upon the roads. Kobolds in the dark— Certainly he had enough of those. The motley group would shortly return to Emerson's entrance to rid the mines of the remnants of the Cyricist's foul worshippers; for all the small use he would be, perhaps he would follow, or perhaps never return to that darkness again. His mind shied away from the thought of it and he tried to breathe deeply in the air relatively without pollution.

He sat at the bank of the small stream, the glimmer of the banked campfire but a short distance away, by his wishes alone. The stream was a trickle of water through dry ground, clean enough that it had been better than no attempt at all to wash some of the filth from his body, his matted hair, his robes largely beyond repair. He was weak and starved enough that no healing spell could have fully restored him; but able at least to walk by himself, to sit to catch his breath. They had taken him through the secret exit on his instructions to below the sky; after finding himself free at last it would have been unbearable to be forced to remain in that underworld. The hilt of his blade was smooth and cool in his right hand, protected from contamination by its nature, the same blade he had held at the beginning of his journey.

 _I've seen blades like that go fer thousands of gold!_ the vaguely repellent halfling had voiced, with the larcenous intent of one who understood not the futility of gold-grubbing. _Don't be foolish, Montaron; Mae govannen, ithil'ohtar_ , the taller human girl had mangled in Xan's language, _Greetings, moonfighter_. Very likely four out of the ten words the human knew of it, the remaining six being _Please forgive you the bad speaking_. She sat in the darkness, by his vision cleansing her armour. She had helped the half-elven woman to heal him, waiting upon her instructions and drawing from a smaller degree of power, a green-flowered ring on her right hand. He supposed she had spared her own face for it, dark brown features gravely marred for the time being upon the right side of her flat cheek and strong line of the chin.

The two half-elves, she forceful, he diffident; that halfling; and three humans he thought of as almost painfully young. The red-haired human adolescent unfastening his chains, cheerily boasting of it, chirping almost without end. Short and lithe, fine-featured for a human, and pestering him with exuberant questions on his blade. More pleasant than the necromancer's two questions of magic, both with implications he considered nothing short of frightening. _Humans are unable to understand the Weave in their short lives_ , he had been taught, and it was true they had not the time to devote to a full and proper study; and yet the children in mage's robe and armour both called to mind other proverbs upon humans, _That in their lifespan they are driven to act, and act with passion; that without the time to meditate they will dash in headlong, and therefore achieve something that resembles ambition, in paths most Tel'Quessir will never choose_. The young mage's face was a mask of writhing black tattoos below wild fawn-coloured hair, his behaviour a display of the manic energy of the human pushed to madness, his movements swift and enthused. Xan had nothing against any of his rescuers, not even the halfling; but though the human's ability had clearly not yet strengthened into that of mages older than he, there was that in the unexpected ways he spoke of the Weave that gave him pause to wonder. The human girl of the official profession of suicide-monger, dark-clad and long-limbed as a gangling spider, walking with the slight awkwardness of height only recently gained. It was one of her tunics he wore in place of his rags, over breeches belonging to the male half-elf, belted at the waist with a ridiculously pink sash of the younger girl; halfway to his knees, loose-fitting, a dark grey weave notable more for durability than quality. He knew little of the inheritances of humans but he doubted a strong blood tie between her and the girl she called sister. Dark in the manner of richly complexioned human rather than corrupted drow, taller in length and stronger in feature, and with tight-curled hair twisted to beaded braids below her helm; Imoen was manifestly freckled where she was not pale, short, and her red hair straight along her shoulders.

"Imoen and I are independents," she was willing to frankly explain, "I suppose mercenaries. Jaheira and Khalid are friends of my late father, and Montaron and Xzar we met upon the road." Her voice reminded him of the sort of careful tones an enchanter was taught to use, a low alto pitch that he listened to despite his own knowledge; calm and convincing. He hadn't missed the dynamic, after his healing had given some ability to pay attention: the half-elves as one group, the human and the halfling as a second, and the human women the typical class of would-be young adventurers. The latter two being the only ones openly admitting to group affiliation.

"I am Xan of Evereska, a Greycloak sent to investigate the strange events of this area. For which group do you choose to act?"

"Mayor Berrun Ghastkill offers a reward," the woman Jaheira said after a pause; "we choose to investigate for the good of the region."

"Altruists," the halfling chimed in, unconvincingly; and, "Try not to be so aggravating, Montaron—a new friend, isn't he?" the necromancer said, smiling widely.

"In my official investigation—" Most importantly there was the moonblade hidden in the chest; and secondary to that were scraps of his own papers, his own magics, not defaced entirely by the beast; and the correspondence of the foul creature, much of which he had himself scribed. "I came here; I wrote myself what the Cyricist had prepared to send to his fellow conspirators; I have more understanding of their encodings than any other—"

"An official Greycloak," Prudence said reflectively, the voice determinative, "Jaheira, Xan's right; the papers ought to be his."

Some respect for law and order. The spells he could learn once more, his duty of investigation continued, however hopeless its apparent end. By obligation of his liberty he supposed he would aid the bedraggled group.

He rose from his solitary place by the stream, slowly, his footing not yet steady to walk without dragging by kobolds. Reverie or sleep, whichever he was capable of entering.

The paladin and the male half-elf were upright, undertaking some form of exercise without their armour. In the patterns of a false fight that lanky awkwardness and impression of all elbows-and-corners was shed from her, movements reasonably adept in their fluidity. She hailed him with a greeting, and again Xan noted the fatal quality of compulsion to hearken to that voice; the mark upon her of the ability to call others to suicide through following her. Touched by that which she swore fidelity to, even unto foolish death.

"Heya, Xan!" the younger girl called, playing with the tools of her larcenous trade in her hands; it was true that she had used it to aid him. He spoke vague civility in reply.

Faint green light shone from the pages of the necromancer's spellbook, levitated to open itself in front of him; frivolous, Xan considered. Cantrips for mundane purposes were sometimes useful, but never to excess.

"Greetings, fellow caster!" The direction of the necromancer's glance upwards from his book changed, briefly, to the pair sparring behind; then his madcap gaze met Xan's. "I see enough of it gathered about you; an elf, an enchanter, intricately spun; the shattered threads grow back to repair themselves, subtle but present."

"I would beg to be spared divinational deranged ramblings," Xan replied; "and you are no diviner in any case." He could understand why the halfling spoke of the human mage as an annoyance; what he said was vague sounds that anyone could have constructed to something resembling an interpretation.

"It's open; the stars are rocks of scarlet ice and blue fire; the stars are astral giant mice weaving cosmic nests—and yet that is neither yours nor my domain, really; enchantment, your own replaced spells..." He looked up with open curiosity.

"Are none whatsoever to do with you. We are of entirely different school and undoubtedly theory of practice," Xan said in rebuke.

"Then—well, I _know_ your school's spell of charming, a version of it." A scroll within the pages of the spellbook had runes, human-written but legible as something he had seen before, turned to his viewing. Xan gave a glance to it; inscribed by a madman, but yet with a connection to the Weave, a reminder of what he had mastered several decades ago. He did not look away. "It makes people very boring, I understand that; and I have that one of sleep of the school; in both there's that interesting double turning," the necromancer said. A second page, and other runes halfway recognisable. "It's as clear as an orbit in honey circling the victims, at least as far as the concept of it, woven and sustained; the steps are admirable and perhaps a holding of the verbal component at the magnification point..."

"A reminder," Xan said. "I imagine that's some understanding of the theory."

"Necromancy's more _fun_ , yes. In daisy chain experiments I've come to believe it's because things used to be alive and thinking so the currents of one's negative will store more readily within them; a fine skewer instead of a tapestry needle. As complicated, but dead people are more predictable," Xzar said. "I've another version in writing, it's transfigured to exchange volume for length at the consumption moment of the sleep sand, or rose petals if one is of a sort to traffic with such odd things. Softer, but blunter. Is it close to one you know?"

"Not very close," Xan said, though in part the lines upon the page did resemble that which he had mastered. That the other mage understood the purpose of the step was not particularly flawed... But he spoke of Xan's school as a critical listener to music he practised little of himself. Xan tore himself away from trying to read from the book; there was no point to beginning to recommence his studies in this fashion. "Leave me be. I shall collapse of exhaustion before I fall of anything else."

"I can do that," the human said, folding away his book with quick motion. "But I was trying to be nice, only telling you about the good invisible things and talking of the common spells; I've heard it's useful. Is it?"

Apparently he had just tolerated the young necromancer's version of an exchange of social courtesies. Xan sighed. "All peoples give undeserved adulation to meaningless interpersonal rituals; a futility no race has yet avoided," he explained to the socially inept. "It's all pointless."

"I suppose you ought to know," Xzar said, nodding. "Never mind. Off you go and pretend to be dead now."

Sooner or later they would all be, Xan reflected; he sat on the lent bedroll. He closed his eyes and wished for the pretence of oblivion in sleep, lest the images of that darkness of the mines rise again in reverie.

—


	6. Chapter 6

"What do you see?"

Xzar waved the yellowed bone through the air at her.

Anatomy tomes at Oghma's temple. _A human tibia, direction primarily vertical. Probably male. Very probably not to be waved about at Nashkel townsfolk._ "It's old," Prudence said; too old to be of any Mulahey had murdered in the iron crisis. "Therefore: where it was obtained..."

"Exactly!" he grinned, with the sort of enthusiasm Imoen used for new locks, cinnamon cookies, and novels of romantic adventure. There hadn't been a sign of such an old burial ground below the mines; beyond Mulahey's secret exit was the obvious place. "Ancient tombs lie before us perhaps a little bit unexplored!"

The light was soft dawn, the ground broken to yellowed rocks, relieved by sparse vegetation in the form of straggling gorse, broom, heather. It was a lonely place, outside the hidden tunnel to the depths of the mines; she'd heard few sounds of animals roaming, the air quiet and still.

"Er—tempting," Prudence said; to mend what Mulahey must have desecrated, the strange secrets of old grounds as the stuffs of adventure.

 _Mulahey bleeding like Dreppin slitting a calf's throat. Witnessing what he had done to his prisoner. The odd sorcery, as the_ least _important compared to those two..._ Yet; the adjective somewhat correct.

"But we have to go back to clearing away the kobolds first. The living above the dead."

"I fail to see why it has to be that way," Xzar said, that wild, gapped grin still across his face. They were the first awake, she on second and final watch, he early and very brightly woken. Odd hours kept adventuring underground.

" _You're_ alive," she replied in kind; "and you shouldn't undervalue it. Corporeality has so much to recommend it."

"Corporeality is a distraction, the dualists say; there is much within the case to recommend it, for it is truth that all living perception is an illusion to greater or lesser deception," Xzar said, gesturing with the bone in long sweeps. "Therefore inevitable separation of the mind—"

"Traitor to Candlekeep or not, I'd disagree," Prudence said; "But we should talk, perhaps, here; that Mulahey is gone and you and Montaron have spoken of other matters to follow for you." There: best to say it outright, to clear the air. More time with him, these tombs, the remnants of the mine, but only under honest understandings.

"Yes, I said that, didn't I?" Xzar nodded vigourously. "After you seemed to think so. Or Monty's said it too. Other requirements. 'Tis true enough of us."

Other requirements; that it was plain he did not wish to speak of, nor would she try to compel it.

"What do you want from this?" she asked.

"Knowledge; the ceasing of illusions, though not everything other people can't see is an illusion; not to have to be afraid. I'm _not_ afraid." He sat suddenly on the hard ground, as if the admission had tired him. "And a hard-boiled egg, which ought to meet with your approval: entirely corporeal."

Always flighty. "You should look after yourself and eat decent meals, on that note," she said; "though you'd have to summon your own chickens. As for approval; why not? What the scholars think is understandable for them, but it's important to be alive. You can't think properly if you're not well, you can't truly separate the mind from the body. Nothing like healthy exercise to clear the mind..." That could be taken as going too far. "Which is much too long-winded a way to say, it's a nice day and you should be enjoying the fresh air."

"Interesting ulterior motives!" Xzar looked up at her standing next to him; she could have reached down to pat his tangled hair, but she could also imagine him biting...not in that way. "Have you heard of the proofs that the eye even sees upside down, that when one scrapes away the back of the organ and glances through it—an ox was used in the first experiments—the image is inverted?" he said. "Everything is upside down and topsy turvy and mad! Or the sight in darkness of eight eyes, or lateral eyes, or the dorsal eyes of the gigantic furred Xenopus. Illusions, all different perceptions; thus should the mind be separated from the living body?"

She doubted the existence of the last creature mentioned. "A mirror; a thing reflected in a mirror; the thing exists." A warrior—or anyone—could ill afford to lose their sight; she'd studied Avecen's work on the eye, the lens below the pupil, the vitreous and aqueous humors, the optic nerves that conveyed the image to the mind in natural reflections.

"And some of the things that nobody else can see exist too," Xzar said. "The Weave's real; some things are real; senses lie."

"One deduces from them—and takes joy in them," Prudence said. "You understand things through living them. You'd miss human senses more than you might think." Mortal life would not be worth protecting if there were no joys to be found of it; she breathed air away from the stale mines. Humanity alone was a gift to savour.

"The ability to taste the different types of gravedirt on this bone, you mean?" Xzar said; and she grimaced at that. He pointed. "The damp dark dirt of Mulahey's domain; by closer investigation, secondly, below that, trapped deep in the cracks, arid dust not dissimilar to this area. And thirdly, grains of stone dust. 'Tis something to find out; and you can't deny that you like the idea..."

"I didn't," Prudence said; and that was it, perhaps—they clashed, and yet she thought of it as _intriguing_.

"And can you guess what happened first: the damp lake we walked from, or this dry land so close to it?" Xzar continued. "On which this—" He waved a vague hand in front of his face. "There's dust in my eye, gorse sticking to my robe, and I'd never claim to like sunrises."

"And yet you want to sit here making the case to walk off and explore it. This dryness," Prudence said; "it is much too different to the underground. Was it magic?"

"I'm cheating," Xzar said, "I can sense it and you can't; yes. Fantastical magical battles altered the earth, leaving fierce trails of ochre fire in the Weave; the tombs which once housed the raw materials perhaps related in some fashion to those old spellcasters of power. It's in the air and over and under the ground; not always nice, but there..."

And this being wizard-fearing Amn, a smaller chance of prior investigations. "I'd want to correct what Mulahey did," Prudence said. "Not to repeat it."

"But there are often things dead people just don't need buried in tombs," Xzar said. "Things the cleric couldn't use either; arcane, or even the sort of weapons priests think are too quick and painless..." he added, as if trying to be generous.

"No, it's because the clergy shouldn't shed blood," Prudence defended the theology. "You've a case; we've a job to complete at the mines first." She heard movement back at the tents, and looked behind to see Imoen emerging, shaking back her red hair from her face.

 _Quit gabbling, fetch me some water, Pru!_ The small bucket and a canteen had been flung at her in quick succession. _Upstream. And hey, gravedigger, you can go cover over the field latrine, or I'll start waking Monty and Jaheira..._

She could see much further in the light of day; the dry rocks and irregular cliffs rising from them, jagged ground with sudden drops often hardly obvious until one stepped closer. It would be easy ground from which to mount an ambush: the high raised rocks with their shadowed crevices, overlooking wide open spaces with little cover. Almost uncannily still.

She saw the dark shape, far ahead, a bundle of something leaning near rocks by the stream's underground source, on the ground. It was curiosity that had her look more closely, to walk carefully up; and then she saw that it was human, or had been.

A human man, his brown hair beginning to grey, an old scar on the left of his face that made his dead expression appear to be widely grinning. Blowflies upon him, eyes glassily open, not in the water but near to it. Not a person connected to Mulahey? Near enough to the hidden passage for that possibility. No obvious signs of injury. The blood drained to darken the skin of the lower half of the body; as if he had lain there unmoved for several days. An indication that his assailant was likely no longer present. The limbs were unstiffening; she'd read of that, that after the days of rigor mortis the body softened again and liquids flowed. He wore leather armour, a shortsword sheathed at his side, a purse inside his roughly spun shirt, a tarnished dagger kept near it. (Why leave a weapon in such poor condition in an iron crisis?) The smell was vile. She looked away from the corpse, across the stone landscape once more. No sign, no reason for a killer to linger here for days, the others close enough that they would hear shouting. She'd not tried to use this on a dead body before; it was not a direct good, but it was _important_ to know—

The green-flowered ring felt as if it had widened her mind, slightly; gave her expanded space in those parts of her consciousness she used to imagine what she intended to do. She touched a blue-glowing hand to the centre of the man's chest, concentrating. _What slew you? What is wrong with your body?_

Decay. It was dead meat she tried to diagnose and that was pain, a fly-egged corpse, a ghoulish lump that wasn't a person any more. Unpleasant nausea in her; there was blood spoiled and old, pooled to the bottom by gravity; muscle tissue degenerated; the brain a dark hole like a thousand ants devouring a scrap of flesh, a few sooty broken threads in a wide whistling empty space, too _many_ things wrong with the corpse compared to life that she couldn't understand enough of the endless dark tides to navigate to the true cause; but the rips in the skin were not enough to cause death, spots upon the upper back and base of the head that still would not have killed. Arcane or clerical means, she tried to think through the dark sensations. Every organ in the body had broken and failed; no living person to heal. Not missile nor fire nor bolt from the heavens; those left marks she would have felt on skin. Not the purpose of a paladin's ability, like trying to stitch with a mace or touch bare skin with a spinning, violent warhammer...

 _...death is not itself the enemy, for we pass to the good judgement of the gods and the planes beyond; but to murder and to stave off death through such means are the evils to combat..._

It was not entirely incompatible with the purpose; but not appropriate. _How did you die?_ A human; a person; every such loss before its time evil. A change swept through her hands, almost unconsciously, and that could have frightened her by its instinctive nature. A colder blue light, no longer from what she prayed to. It materialised to respond to inquiry.

 _He died. How was it induced?_ A sharper seeking, going quickly forward into the flesh like a bolt to the precise circle of a target. The remains of the cardiac vessels, the power guided to the centre of the body, where something was marked and perhaps narrowed and odd, fractures in the anterior part of Siamorphe's artery and the rapid collapse of the heart beating too quickly, blocked and the moment that death came seconds after it abruptly stopped—

It hadn't even been a minute since she'd laid hands on the body. She suddenly pulled away her hand, sitting back on her knees, startled; too much knowledge, disturbing information rushing through her. Disturbing guesses, anyway, Prudence told herself. That there wasn't a significant mark on the body besides oddity about the heart; that perhaps it was that particular disease he had succumbed to alone in this wilderness...

 _Or you could have just asked the necromancer, or Jaheira the healer_ , she reprimanded herself.

The second question: as to what he had been attempting to do.

"This dagger I see before me," Xzar said, grinning almost as a skull, white light gathered about his eyes, the blackened dagger floating in front of him, "is from a tomb; and was once a heart. Smoke in the street like black bile and fires searing bodies, tales that their bread was made out of blood, hunted for books carried and words written on hearts. The words on hearts metaphorical; the bread not intended to be—but I wouldn't think that would be a very useful recipe," he added in tones of more practicality, "flour's not thick enough to mix fresh blood with it."

" _That_ ," Imoen said, "is really, really wrong. Although I guess that's why you use oatmeal in black puddings..."

"That's why I don't let the crazy mage cook," Montaron said.

"It was all a lie to make them chase the people," Xzar said, his eyes still glittering palely, speaking softly and quickly. "Fear and gnomes and humans, together, homunculus of four elements; intricacies within it of metal and not all mage-woven, that boiling water makes steam and steam moves the top of a kettle and steam itself is power, fine clockwork moving together and a dagger of the heart to hold it; many precise-tuned gears, unliving but if there were enough of them could it breathe and live and imagine like the tiny cells that squirm and pulse within the skull?"

"Metal and magery could never make life," Jaheira said, glaring.

"There were so many people running. Through the dark streets, cut down from behind because they hated them for what they thought they were, they come for you in the night—" Xzar spoke in apparent distress, his words coming more quickly. "They took them all away, chased like blackbirds for ill luck and they said one must defend oneself. Then they constructed a man of metal, a crafted man to guard, and on his forehead the breath of life: life is truth and truth is life and if you're under the ground you can't do anything—I do see that much— _emet_ for truth on the forehead, guide it to follow orders and hurt the ones who hurt the people—and erase the aleph and what remains means _met_ for death in the runes they draw, and the golem returns to dust and unmoving metal once more—except when they all go mad—"

"That's the people of the book, sounds like," Imoen said, looking up at Khalid. "The ones who invented golems. Puffguts likes his bacon, but his mum was one of 'em. _Chotmo shel hakadosh baruch hu emet_ ," she quoted; "the seal of the divine is truth." She grinned. "What? Creepy necromancers aren't the only ones who know things." Xzar didn't glance at her.

Xan frowned, speaking sharply: "You go too deep, necromancer. Divination is a dangerous art and such immoderate use will do you harm." He'd come to the body with them, sitting with his sword across his knees; frail after his imprisonment.

"A story of interest. I see the first mechanical motion of the gears and I see the heart within, ever moving," Xzar said. "I see the metal golem amok by their lights and killing the children of those who went after the people. I see the golem bearing the sign of death on its forehead and the heart taken from its body. Then it passes to different hands, stolen hands, enchanted hands who see it for cutting instead of beating. There's magical residue beyond the first making that clings to it in high key double bass, invisible grounds. Lightning storms of invocation, blood drains of necromancy down from the skies, scorching winds pulled from the planes to raze in their paths—the interesting parts, the Weave bursting to fire, if only how they did it was within the grasps of memories like grains of ground cartilage— Then dead hands clutch it, dead fingers, the diviner and the conjurer and eternal opposites on the field of battle. The one who knew the most of necromancy was the victor, then he came and called the wail of a thousand banshees at the one holding it dead; the dead need burying and there are enchantments to hold the tomb. Darkness gods, no, _not_ gods, don't let them—revenants, the dead their due a curse—" He grew agitated, shaking his head fiercely; "Ghosts that make thieves afraid, no, that's not the frightening part, ghosts aren't that frightening, all of them were gone, can't pretend they still wanted life but that's what the diviner did, that's why they bothered with pretend curses—"

"You're not that invaluable a raconteur. Xan's right," Prudence said.

"The revenants are supposed to come to all of it—the three crowns painted on the walls—uprooting those who come in the night in the midnight dark—unhallowed and they come for the dead they take all in the dead—graverobber, four, five, pentacle, crooked-angle square, points—coming—claws—" He saw too much, gestured desperately; she reached forward, laying a hand on his left sleeve, talking;

"You can stop it," she said—trivial, standard words; "step back from it. Return—"

"No, that's why—seeing too much, I thought about those who see too much—" He leaned forward, his right hand gesturing under her face. "But one shouldn't follow divinations, you don't let them have you, you don't have to give yourself to any forces outside coming to get you, none of them—" Then the white faded; he moved back to sit straight once again, and smiled happily. "The dagger's very sharp and good at stabbing besides the curse on it. Does anyone have further questions?"

Jaheira folded her arms. "First your wanderings in the wilderness bring a necromancer, child, and now the body of a graverobber. 'Tis regrettable tendency."

No; she still wasn't doing better at getting along with Jaheira. "You've further eyesight than me," Prudence said evenly. "It could have been any of us to find the man."

"He didn't die of anything that marked him and he didn't have any of the energy-drain signs either," Xzar said. "Could have been a fragile heart from spirits sending nightmares, after all—I'd have to cut out what's left of the heart and do extended magical tests for that, slice it for some staining acridine and a chloridate immersion—"

" _No_ ," Jaheira said.

"I carried out research of this place when I first came," Xan said, his voice flat. "The human superstitions feature ghosts and an alleged mage duel: a factional dispute between local human death cults and conspiracies of some description, the usual exaggerated rumours about the extent of the confrontation. Wreaking irresponsible and inevitable devastation, as is the way of certain human mages. There were elaborate tales of hauntings as a reason for civilised peoples to leave the place alone; and naturally, I can imagine, a perfectly suitable place to hide the foul schemes of that Cyricist." Prudence had not heard Xan once speak Mulahey's name; epithets of distance. "I suppose we have inherited ourselves some cruel obligation to return the dagger to its grave where no doubt a flock of ghouls wait to eat us all?"

He sounded almost content with the idea of such a fate.

"Don't worry, enchanter!" Xzar said. "It's not one of those that sticks to your hand if you steal it. Just as well, isn't that, Monty? One could leave the dagger here, let the poor ghosts stay miserable alone, and flee north once more. Or one could find out what really happened."

"Could always split up and catch up," Imoen said. "Gotta go back through the mines for the rest of the kobolds, help out the guards—but it's only kobolds left in there now, it's not like they really need much help." She pronounced judgement on the kobolds with the tones of a seasoned adventurer whose slaying of them numbered in the thousands.

"Be more cautious, Imoen; there is always a small chance that any encounter will injure you," Jaheira said; correctly, of course. "Thank you for volunteering."

"Er...no, Ikindofthinkatomb'dbe goodpracticefortrapsandlocks, right?" Imoen said. Her eyes widened innocently, in that manner of preparing to get her own way. "And maybe nice treasure. I pick Pru for my team, she's _supposed_ to be able to yell at the undead and make them explode—" Prudence felt suddenly inadequate. "And I guess the necromancer, and Khalid, of course. You'd look after us, right, Khalid?" She smiled up at him. No; she wasn't batting her eyelids; Khalid was a guardian figure. The pink cloak rippled upon her back.

"It is...g-good that you trust me, I suppose." Khalid glanced at his wife, some form of silent communication passing between them.

"Repair Mulahey's necromantic evils, then, if you wish it so," Jaheira said. "Practice your arts against the undead and unnatural, perhaps. I will speak to Ghastkill myself, lest his incapable soldiers have indeed run to trouble."

"Take care, d-dearest." A kiss on the cheek.

"A doomed and pointless exercise," Xan said, "but... Yes. This circuitous route to return to the town proper. In the interests of furthering the investigation. Perhaps." He turned away from the direction of the mines' exit. Certainly he should not be dragged back to that place, or anywhere he did not wish to go. "I don't suppose we could hope that melodramatic divination gave such minor practicalities as location details." He looked down at his sword; the blade's blue grew more fiercely bright.

"That's from tracking the gravedirt."

—

It was an open stone archway, like a narrow tear ripped in the earth; there had once been some design carved in the doorway, and fragments of paint striped across in dark red lines yet clung to it. The straggling gorse abruptly stopped growing in a small semicircle about the entrance, and dull sand that appeared undisturbed marked the passage inwards, as smooth as if it had been scraped over in recent days. Half-concealed in the crevices of one of the larger stone hills, it would not be obviously visible to a passer-by. A small gulch marked a sharp drop some few feet from the dark entry, off the spreading path that led to it. There was that about the tomb which coldly raised hairs on the arm. A feeling, quite evidence-based, of haunting.

"I'd cast to examine, but I'm flat out of spider eyes." Xzar patted down the pouches in his robes. "Perhaps I ought to have remembered to ask the druid to bring me some from those wraiths...or perhaps not," he reconsidered, and turned suddenly to Xan. "Do you know spells of clairvoyance?"

"Much of my book was ruined, you will remember." Xan's eyes narrowed as he glared at the space between the rocks.

"The tracks have been covered over," Khalid said. Out of character for one of Mulahey's mad brutality; for a terrified graverobber who had seized only one dagger also. "P-perhaps the spirits are tidy?" Prudence would not have expected a joke of that sort coming from him, and smiled nervously. Then again, it wasn't necessarily a jest at all.

"That one, is it a pressure plate?" Imoen pointed to some shadows on the ground beyond the entrance.

"Yeah. Not bad, human." Montaron stepped forward. "Don't tread on the third flagstone."

He led; Imoen had the task of torch-carrying, which perhaps kept her out of some trouble. Xan's sword was bright, dispelling the shadows from about it, and he looked carefully about himself, raising his face to the high roof, to the wide darkness. The stones upon the ground were dusty and indistinguishably scuffed. The walls had been planed to smoothness, even the ceiling rising swiftly. It was more spacious than it had seemed from the outside; the rock must be thin between that black roof and the sky outside, as implausible as that felt from the perspective of walking through the darkness that clung to the hollows and corners like thick spider's web in the oldest of Candlekeep's cellars. Ahead were the first signs of Mulahey's depredations: shapes of coffins thrown to the ground like scraps of firewood, torn cloth of grave-wrappings, even stray discarded bones. Desecrations. The coffins were marked by scratches that defaced the remnants of decoration and inscription; the jawless skull upon the sunburst was crudely marked as recent usage. Upon the walls were marks of dark colour, more carefully drawn than the kobolds' depiction of their master. Once this had been an elaborate resting-place; a place dedicated to...

Mulahey had interfered with what had been buried here, but he did not seem to have committed destruction upon the wide-stetched mural across the walls, flickering by Imoen's torch and Xan's cold blue light. They were complex designs, engraved and carefully decorated. Interlocked symbols of three spread like vines over almost all the surface. A black, clenched gauntlet, its fingers cruelly taloned. Spinning teardrops that might at one time have been gold-leafed; they appeared on the wall as negatives, a whirling circle about a yellowed skull. A tower of bones that housed a white skull, rising winding to the heights of the ceiling. They were portrayed as if they danced about each other, as their representatives had been once allied. Symbols of what the dead here had been sworn to.

The emblems of the three now known as dead themselves, Prudence's theological readings had her know quite well; whose powers Cyric now reigned over. Xzar stood at the wall. He splayed his fingers across it, his hand on the stone; then the signs of black grease spread from where he touched. Her appreciation of the value of historical artwork ended at the point where unholy symbols of despicable gods began.

"Tell me in the brief time remaining before something smites us, what human patrons do we offend?" Xan said.

"The Dead Three. Bane, Bhaal, and Myrkul," Prudence said. The dark film of grease crossed far, hiding all the images from sight by its vandalism; it was more comfortable that way, perhaps.

"They're gods who died, they can't do anything any more!" Xzar gloated. "It's easy; they won't know it, and it should happen!" He looked up at his handiwork and stepped contentedly back.

"He's a fool who'd go stand in the rain and yell up at the Stormlord why he shouldn't exist," Montaron said. "Spare the blasphemy, lunatic."

"I..." Xzar ran blackened fingers across his forehead, leaving dark trails mixed with the dotted tattoos there. "It makes the other symbol stand out more, doesn't it? The one that's far worse than the real sun. But we made Mulahey dead, nothing but the old ghosts here any more. Let's find out!" He bent over one of the broken coffins, examining the contents.

"That is _understood_ ," Xan said quietly; "his source of raw materials duly identified. Perhaps a minor responsibility to end what he used to guard it." Frail; his sword held defensively before himself.

"Not your responsibility," Prudence said; "we'd do it; you...don't have to."

"I said," the elf uttered coldly, "that it was my duty to investigate. That includes this place—this area above the ground." His eyes flickered slightly in the direction of the daylight yet visible, though he did not turn his head to look back. "Not that I ought to hope for attention paid to sensible advice, but you could at least have the common sense to undertake it efficiently."

Quickly, then. This part of the tomb was but scraps Mulahey had left behind. Montaron and Imoen pointed to a tarnished silvery funnel, a fire-spitting pipe upon the ground. Forward; there were shelves set upon the walls, a catacomb's burials. What remained of texts upon them was in older Common; _here lies ye worthy and modest Mage of valour Gilbred esteemd Son of Cyrus thro gate of Lord Myrkul_...

Montaron rummaged through a crevice in the walls; "Scrolls!" Xzar said, gleefully paging through them, "very good—"

"B-be quieter," Khalid said; "we go far."

It was a rough shuffling, at first; a bonelike creaking that did not sound as if it came from their footfalls; a change in the shadows beyond them. Xan's face appeared to grow paler in the blue light of his blade; Khalid looked nervously about. In a place once dedicated to the Dead Three Cyric would have some title, yet the same wrongness had not made itself felt to her as in Mulahey's lair, Prudence thought; mild sense of something, dim and shadowed, it was not nothing that had haunted the graverobber to his death. Imoen had placed their torch into a bracket on the walls; her bow at her shoulders was easily in her reach.

"Greenstone." Imoen stood from her knees and held up a small ring; she blew dust away from it. "On the ground here, not...y'know, from anywhere horrible or anything..."

The voice spoke before anything else came into view:

 _"Give the dagger back._ "

Black-skinned, it was; yellow-eyed; flesh that shifted as if made of worms, elongated, tall; flanked by two pale and slender corpses, white-skinned, red-eyed; behind them many translucent shapes of ectoplasm that floated silver in the air and blended to each other's forms, indistinct spirits greeting those who held the possession. They'd weapons drawn and ready for it, she and Khalid and Montaron; but a thing that talked, one was supposed to _try_ negotiating...

"Why do you want the dagger?"

It only repeated itself. " _The dagger_ —" Its talons; it leaped forward like a maddened beast. Prudence caught it on the edge of her shield; unnaturally strong, burning eyes—

"Khalid?"

He'd offered custody of it; he patted himself down, nervously, then lunged forward instead.

"Imoen!" he cried out, his sword drawing complex patterns across a white body, carefully avoiding it not by retreating but slipping aside, stepping around it...

 _Imoen!_ Imprecations in an unsisterly spirit filled Prudence's mind—

"Er...oops?" Imoen volunteered. She'd brushed against Khalid upon the trail, chatting lightly to him about spices— " _Right_! Then take your dagger—Pru, duck!"

Imoen aimed the dagger effectively; Prudence did as she suggested. It flew above her head and into the revenant's dark chest. Among the writhing lines of it, the dagger was drawn into the body. Then the hilt began to beat in regular rhythm.

The revenant moved faster; Montaron swore, hacking at the knees of the slim ghoul upon the left, clawed marks across his face.

 _The dagger, Xzar said it was stolen from the golem_ — The revenant was inhumanly quick; its blows on her shield almost knocked her over; she couldn't dare to risk defences to return the same attack. An... _undead monstrosity_ , eyes brighter than Mulahey's ghouls, staring and shaking in its head and piercing through her skull. The transparencies hanging in the air were whispering something, faint hints of other tones spoken at a pitch too high for human ears; she knew why the graverobber must have feared them so, and to the sounds Khalid spoke a whimper of his own in pained hearing.

"Discover. Explain," Xzar said, casting steadily.

"We delude ourselves to think we can stand against such spirits..." Xan moaned, but the blue light did not flicker. The silver ghosts were about the revenant, about the dagger; its movements grew ever faster, a whirl of storming claws; they would rip past the edge of her shield, tear quickly beyond mail.

"Monty, you're slowing—yours drains energy!" Xzar called. "Pale, not shadows; they're part wraith part haugbui, divine casting—how absolutely fascinating—the third divine too, construct, the heart, it'll implode, except not soon enough—"

A pair of missiles whirled from his hands and landed in the black writhing mass. Still it moved; and its claws opened Prudence's sword arm. It tore into her body, its stench of death and despair.

"Get out of the w-way!" Khalid pushed her quickly aside; he fought the revenant in her place, wounded quickly by its flashing claws and body. That wasn't right, wasn't fair.

 _The heart—heart not supposed to be there_ — Prudence reached to the revenant's back, her hand shaking. To cast around the dagger in the dead flesh, would not try and examine the corpse. The black writhing of it beat; there the shape of it, there the motion to half-cure by shoving her hand inside.

The revenant cut across Khalid's collarbone. His movement stopped, and the white wraith by him sunk long teeth into his neck. The prayer in her ignited; and she _hurt_ the revenant. Pressed and forced the dagger out as she would have in a human's flesh; it felt her as pain abominable. _trapped seeking gestalt anger command—_ more than one corpse bound together at the whim of others, others divine successors—she caused it _agony_ insofar as the corpse could feel at all, almost a betrayal of what she was—

The dagger fell from the chest; she'd planned the motion, kicked it sliding backward across the ground to where perhaps the transparent ghosts would follow, and the black revenant turned on her. There was horrible pain in Khalid's frozen face, blue veins drawn to the surface of his paling skin, and she could not get past the revenant to him even as the wraith ate him. It moved more slowly, her blade peeled bits of its flesh from it, but it didn't turn from its path.

"Energy drain, the most _interesting_ idea—" Xzar leaned forward, grabbing at Khalid's arm himself, chanting; Prudence saw something black come to the wraith's fangs where they met Khalid's skin, and then a small bolt of fire came from Xzar's hands into the jaw of the reeling wraith, setting it stumbling and ablaze. Imoen sunk an arrow of the mines to its flesh. Khalid was frozen and still bleeding, his eyes in frantic motion; but alive still, the wraith set afire. Away from him.

Prudence's blade sunk into the revenant's torso; a downward strike, seeking to sever something of the crawling flesh. It was soft-boned, blackened tissue forced together like dough.

 _Cut off the head, that's supposed to always work—_ To sever the spine and flesh needed great force for a human; this was a degenerate form of a corpse.

It moved more slowly, faltering; she saw it unbalanced, leaning across for her. Swept its right leg under it with a kick; there the chance, _would have been too slow for Khalid_ — An overhand slash, seeking to part that lowered black neck, even as its very shapelessness set it back in balance. There were wormlike shreds twisting on her blade; she saw the body on the ground, the soft rotting head by it. She swung the scimitar at the burning wraith. The silver fingers of a ghostly figure swept through the red blood on her arm. Xzar chanted again to aid Montaron, bright missiles invoked;

"Not as interesting. Raw force, that does work against these; not quite in your scope, strong enchanter?"

The wraith was on the ground, burned by Imoen's arrows, no threat to Khalid; Prudence cast a quick healing where he bled most, and took the second wraith upon her shield for Montaron to cut down the tendons.

The ghosts surrounded them.

 _Ghosts of faithful of the Dead Three_. They passed through her, about her; the tomb was silver fog, the songs on the edge of hearing, just enough to feel pain without understanding what was said.

"We left you the dagger—Imoen, put down that ring—"

They touched—did not touch, simply laid that silver film across and into one; they gestured and shifted back, as if to lure; some were about the dagger on the ground but most of them came to the living, pitiless as they were incomprehensible.

This was...difficult. One needed concentration; one could not spar at the same time; one needed faith to abandon weapon for prayer. She had sheathed the scimitar, carefully reached below her collar for the cord about her neck. The coarse stone shape of it was reassuringly solid, at the least. In symbol it was a variant of the _asklepian_ : snake twined about sword rather than cleric's staff, healing and renewal directing the purpose of the blade.

 _It would be suffering_ , she told herself, _to be a spirit bound to a tomb._ She held the symbol as the focus of faith, and tried _._

"That's not nothing," Xzar said, "risky; I don't think they'll like that, _I_ don't much like the sense of it." Her prayer sought to compel the ghosts; to make them dissolve and return to rest. They were white, near to but not touching her right hand. They shifted back, slightly; she moved forward, waiting.

"Go to rest," she said.

They reformed to different shapes beyond her, though still they avoided the symbol's touch. Indistinct shapes with too many flowing parts for a human's mind to understand, at first; then she heard Khalid cry out.

"J-jaheira! No! I know s-she—this c-cannot be real!"

Montaron swore, upon acts in the thirty-third chapter of _Sins of the Flesh Golem_ ; Imoen spoke:

"Monsters! I've never seen anything like them—what kind of beasts—!"

Prudence saw three shapes arrayed: on the right a giant; on the left merely long and inhuman and corpselike; and in the middle constantly changing, a tall thing with horns at its head and long claws that shifted form with each motion. For a moment its face changed to something like her own, then became a shapeless blur of everyone else under the sun.

 _In faith I ought to conquer such monsters—ghosts or not—_ She went toward them, praying for the strength to dispel these visions. That it was these strange monsters for her, instead of the sort of image Khalid saw—there were other fears that they could have given— Lest they detect it she turned her mind to focus.

"They're not controlling minds! It's not the fear that I can cast—it's an illusion! Pay no attention, Monty!" Xzar had closed his eyes, and with arms outstretched in front of himself walked forward.

"You would be correct," Xan said, "an illusion; quite an adequately convincing one, I should say. I...would think that it ought to be dispelled."

Prudence spoke again, not yelling as Imoen imagined the process, trying her voice as another instrument of faith. "You'll scare nobody else to death. Go where you belong." The silver shapes that she could see trembled.

"That...h-had effect," she heard Khalid say, and that gave confidence.

Xzar walked to her side, his eyes still closed; a hand brushed across her shoulder and almost distracted her focus.

"Fairly tenacious spirits," he said. "Responding to what makes afraid—no I won't look at all—probably dragons with feet like rabbits! No enchantments that would work both ways; not on the positive plane to drain from..."

The three monsters yet faced her; the shape of his wife's body, to Khalid. She walked into them, and they drew back, but it was not enough. The failure hers, not in what she served.

"Is it," she asked, forcing herself to the concentration— _hold them back if nothing else_ , "a lack of strength, or a lack of a directed path?" In her mind the asklepian was the same vivid blue as healing, a metaphorical glow that pressed away the ghosts like shadows from a candleflame, and like that light spread and dissipated in a sphere.

"Latter," Xzar said, and with indignation added, "I know nothing of this! I ought to cast spells of control more than destruction. Why do you trouble—"

"It _is_ necromancy." They said that practise improved one's abilities. Perhaps the past seconds of staring at ghosts and praying for their rest had increased her skill; not enough. "How do your spells shape paths?"

"One doesn't drain from those already dead; the pipe of the negative opens to draw from the living—" he thought aloud, his eyes still closed.

"A necromantic drain. Could you..." She was slow to speak, concentrating. The ghosts of the monsters troubled her, as if she ought to remember their shapes but could not; she disliked it, one could say _feared_ it, when knowledge failed.

"Takes on one end, flows through to the controller because life abhors the void," Xzar said. "Reverse and it's uncontrolled on the end that receives life, that's not bad here. Connection from live to dead without that other side, the fiddly bits and stability. Give me time! I think it's interesting enough!"

She gave a brief nod. _The strength of faith. The practice to_ hold _that_. He whispered to himself.

"I can't forget what they're like on the inside of my eyelids, they're the monsters in dreams," Imoen said, "illusion or not—don't _chat_ about it, Pru, someone _died_ of being afraid of them—"

"Point me," Xzar said, "I think the equations make as much sense as stuffing out of glass eyes with the crossbars."

 _I think I'm going to trust that._

"One pace forward. Ninety degrees right. Length five feet."

He cast a white hole in the air, a drain. It took what Prudence gave it, pulled it along the space in an instant's time; alive prayer and it hit the ghosts, the monsters twitching and shifting to formless silver, breaking, leaving— _I understand now, I could shape the prayer better next time_ — They melted like a flowing white stream to the shadows still beyond.

Xzar's eyes were open, enthused, and he grabbed her arm. "You made them run! Come after—!" He pulled her a step forward, surprisingly strong; she knew the counter to reverse that untrained move.

"Don't go. Probably trapped—" She held him back; after a moment he relaxed and gave way, leaning briefly against her.

"You're likely right. _Cedo nunc_..." Slowly he stood back, his eyes at her face.

Xan shook his head. "I'm surprised you managed not to blow anything up."

Khalid was on the ground, his skin a pale unnatural to him, his back against the wall of the tomb. He breathed heavily, some of the scrapes upon him still bleeding. "You need healing," Prudence said; but he gestured to stop her.

"It won't h-help. I will need a r-restoration casting; I know this effect of the undead to be not easily mended. Jaheira or the t-temple will..." Khalid half-smiled, as if he was concerned to give reassurance rather than receive it himself. "I can still walk, once I c-catch my breath. 'Tis nothing I have not felt before." Guilt at his injury smote her; and it was true that she lacked the skill for the difficult restoration prayer.

"Yes, _that's_ the symptoms of an energy drain," Xzar said. "Blue veins drawn to the surface, withdrawal of fresh blood from the skin, lassitude of the muscles—"

"Khalid doesn't need to hear that list," Prudence said firmly.

"Oh, very well." He whirled again to face her. "But I will have to write up that half-elf blood serves quite nicely as a grease spell component—transmute some oil, fill the bad wraith's mouth with it and crudely set it on fire. Likely the magic from the elven side—"

"Likely ye getting carried away," Montaron muttered.

"You s-still," Khalid said, slowly pulling himself to his feet, "need far more help than I could ever g-give." He set his shield carefully against the tomb's wall, standing with only his longsword as carried weight.

"Montaron?" Prudence said. He stood upright; he was lightly scratched, but his movements seemed to be once more his usual pace, and he replied that he needed nothing. "Could you lead on?"

The ghosts had fled to what was perhaps the centre of the tomb's hill; the path twisting and circular, a brief Knossos labyrinth, trap-bound. At each turn there seemed some flash of ice-silver hanging in the passages, withdrawing into deeper shadow the moment a glance fell upon it. _As if they lead us._ But it was duty to follow them.

The labyrinth's centre was an altar, dark-stained, marked by a black sun; and about it a mass of shifting silver shimmering in the air. Strange fireflies. They no longer changed to shapes recognisable, a pale haze moving as if blown by winds from other planes.

"T-try again," Khalid said quietly, his left hand raised behind him, braced against one of the dark walls.

She stepped forward, unarmed by the general rules of such things—not that physical weapons would aid in any case; and this time they whispered and swarmed around her.

 _...we died in this place..._ In her head it seemed as many voices tried to whisper in unison, and failed at the task.

"You killed a man. I thought this existence must hurt you also," Prudence said. Candlekeep had its share of ghosts, supposedly. Dim reflections of what had only used to be people; more like a strange force of nature than someone capable of guilt. "Leave this plane for the ones to which you belong."

 _...we died in this place..._ the soft choir echoed again; and spoke further:

 _...guards over our own gifts and treasures guards over the tombs of our enemies matters not years hence seek out thieves..._

It was information she could have known already. Shape the prayer to truly end these; let them turn to light and kill no more. If the ghosts were to be pitied, aid their tattered souls in this way.

 _necromancer of myrkul's service_ , echoed the silver whispers clambering about her, _soldier of bane, murderer for bhaal; transmuter of bhaal sorcerer of bhaal diviner of myrkul..._

"Those patrons are dead; and I'm sworn against their ilk." She prayed; this time she could shape it more directly against them. Train it as a channel.

 _...serve the one of three crowns serve those who hold it_. An impression of a plural term, there. Troubling; but she could not control their semicoherent whispers. End it quickly.

"Go," she repeated, the prayer strong in her throat at last, a channelling turned to the formless silver.

 _...command..._

Undramatically, they disappeared.

"T-that altar," Khalid said. "It is...evil."

Dark-stained. Marked for Cyric. The stones of it somewhat crude in craftwork, below the standards of the once well-carved graves. "Xzar, how old are those bloodstains?" Prudence said.

He went forward quickly enough, running a finger across the heavy surface. He summoned no magelight for himself, asking Xan to shine the moonblade more strongly; it was a difficult task for a mage to modify even spells he knew well.

"The oldest a year, not more than one-and-a-half; the most recent not quite a month gone. At least four times." He grinned confidently, and scraped dark chips from the stone; placed them in a vial already filled by some liquid, and examined the reaction. "Human."

 _Townsfolk who disappeared? What was left of the corpses likely among Mulahey's tools_ —the ghouls, the chances were, for the skeletons they had seen had been yellowed by age— They would only be able to tell this to the mayor.

"The work of that one," Xan said, his tone vicious. "Take it apart—to well-deserved pieces—"

"Like that part of it, mister elf?" Imoen said, pointing at a bolt set to block a stone from sliding across.

"Plunder it," Prudence said, the words almost a harsh-voiced command. A full ritual of purifying the altar to a nobler cause was beyond her craft. Desecrating it would not make most of the group any more heretical to Cyric.

Montaron went to touch the seal; the same sort of movements he had used in Mulahey's lair, working slowly and steadily. A place of secondary storage for the Cyricist? Or worse, relics of what the altar was used for?

"Those the gods wish to destroy they first make mad," Xzar quoted; he stood next to her, away from Cyric's altar. "And yet I never did anything to _him_." He jerked his chin fiercely in the direction of the dark sun's symbol. "One falls down when reasoning is destroyed. One never comes so far and refuses to find out, does one?—No matter what is risked—"

"That's one way to seek a future grisly death," Xan said. "We ought to leave this place—"

 _Have to make sure he is well—all of them_. "We're about to. None of us will die here," she said; Xan muttered a few low syllables in response, turning his head from her.

"I know exactly what you mean," Xzar said to nobody in particular; Montaron's hands clicked over the seal. Imoen gave a nod in interest. The stone slid open: parchment, jewels, gravedust that blew from the crevice by a wind of its own and settled into a small pyramid in front of the altar, before any had a chance to respond.

 _...bone dust component for..._

It was obvious and her mind spared one curse before she ran forward, Montaron and Imoen hurrying back...

Then it was the fear that took the mind. _Run_ , it told her, forced, dark things that were better buried, black bats flying with deathwound fluid, clear ascites staining claws, _run away run away where it cannot find—_

Forward instead, stumbling, aiming at the bone dust; late, entirely too late with the shaking blackness over her eyes and the seizing fright.

Soft gasp, bump on the ground. High scream, Imoen. Verbal curse. Dulled words.

"No, I'll lie down and die here, of course! To be in the ground once more was doomed anyway."

"I can't stop them! Inside get out black claws red hands they found me scared—"

The thin bones struck her and flung her to the ground of the tomb. Xzar ran into the darkness; Khalid lay collapsed on the ground, Xan sitting and staring blank, at least Imoen and Montaron only shaking but still standing—

"Im, Montaron! Stop Xzar!"

All so _obvious_ , dark pieces on a board. The white creature's burning eyesockets were on her. A black sword appeared in its boned hand. A skeleton. Twice Khalid's height. Never any known humanoid, of course, not recognisable a demon of Cyric's realm—

That was ridiculous. The bones that flared from its shoulders like spaulders of armour were kleis sourced from another skeleton; fractions of three spinal columns stretched its back and neck; the skull enlarged and another composite with horns built of teeth given to the frontal bone; several sets of ribs a thick cage of bones; femurs bound together in the legs; phalanges linked on the feet large enough to support the frame. Deranged patchwork. No time. She stood.

"I command you." She still had the symbol ready. The skeleton's power was dark and almost tangible; it swung that gifted blade and she moved from its path. A deep hole in the wall behind her, fragments of stone scattering. The weapon; far more powerful than that first bare hit.

Strong. She kept the prayer, not drawing her weapon. The faith to hold it back. She looked into the eyes: _false. Nothing there. Fighting for this is stronger than the dead—_

She'd not the ability to destroy it. A blue shock to the centre of its blackness; it stumbled. The skeleton had the power to absorb a thousand more such. The steps fumbled, brief confusion. Her hand was already on the neck of her cloak. She pulled the material free, tangled it low between the long legs. The confusion ended; the black sword struck down, but the creation tripped and fell.

 _No time. Already too much._

Leverage on where the spinal blocks would be for a human. Standing on it, one foot on the right arm, slice away the magic weapon first—unnatural strength, yet she still outweighed this thing—

The wrist bones parted: a row of small carpals, easiest to make to fall apart. The undead's strength shook her; she shifted in balance on its spine. Quickly pushed the scimitar through vertebrae at the base of skull and let go. The bone limbs didn't stop moving. She kicked at the severed phalanges; it and the black sword rose in the air. She caught it, and brought it down upon the skull.

Even through a glove it felt like plunging her hand into boiling water. Cyricist weaponry, really shouldn't wield— The blade cut through skull and spine as if through butter, as if it lent her a giant's strength. When the skeleton returned to bone dust and the black sword also dissolved it was relief.

 _No time._ Khalid, drained, breathed closed-eyed and flat on the ground; Xan yet stared silent into space. She took her own weapon and rushing out heard Montaron's cry—

 _Too late._

Imoen was flat against the left wall, Montaron fallen by her; no sign of Xzar. Projectiles whirled through the passageway, a fiery arrow to the ground by her. She flung herself to the two of them, laid hands on Montaron because she couldn't do anything else. He bled far more than anyone should from a single dart, blood weakened; clot that, heal it quickly, the sorcery coming to her as efficiently as a prayer—

Xzar, outside. Alive. "Bait, the tomb, they caught us, rabbits, the trap! They want everything, they come after it, eat everything, the other sun—"

A woman's voice. "Lamalha, be a dear and silence him." A spell; pained gasps replacing frantic words.

They were like Mulahey, but dampened. Subtler. Cyricists still. Couldn't have felt them from a distance. Troubling with hostage-taking. Couldn't afford to think of that with anything other than cold words.

 _None of them will die here._

Another voice. Prudence would have guessed at least three; could see little out in the light. "Caught a wizard, Telka? I'd throw him back."

The first woman again. "Be quiet, Maneira. What other rats have we caught here?"

"More rats than number with you. Let the wizard go," Prudence said. The narrow rectangle beyond the doorway still showed little; her fingers peeled the cloak from Imoen's back. She ignored her sister's short gasp.

A laugh; drawn slightly too long for the boundaries of sanity. "You speak truth. Are you perhaps the one—the one who murdered Mulahey, let us say? The one who ripped out his guts with her sword." A level of detail.

They had all played a part in Mulahey's demise. But it could aid to shield the others.

"You shouldn't hesitate," the woman said. "And let it be the truth: Cyric will tell me if you lie."

Fellow Cyricists.

"That gives you an interesting advantage. None of us have that ability," Prudence said, and brought the cloak's fastenings together about her neck. "I am."

"Then it is your death we seek. Come closer, little rat." Low amusement in the voice; the priestess played. "Or would you rather the massacre of your companions first? Telka's fire arrow rests on the wizard's back."

"She likely would," spoke another.

"No. Don't hurt him." It felt as if dark tongues of fire licked at her while she spoke, seeking if it was truth. _Don't hurt him. Nor anyone._ The dark fire easily found those thoughts uppermost in her."Is it only I who would serve as your bloodprice?" Bearing the cloak steadied her voice; filled something in her centre.

She touched Imoen's shoulder to tell her to stay; approached the tomb's exit behind the shelter of the walls. Montaron followed her, staying behind her as though her body served as a shield.

She saw more of their enemies. _Time._ Xzar's green robes vivid on the dry grass; a booted foot on his back, a bow with a fire arrow pointed downward. A leather-armoured woman bearing only a sheathed shortsword as apparent weaponry. Two women in heavy armour glinting in the sun, the Dark Sun shown openly for insignia: one with grey, stonelike skin, the other burly and black-haired.

Laughter once again. "More so than supposed. Zeela, do you sense it? It is a wouldbe cavalier. Sufficient for a Day of Dark Sun."

"How unexpected," Zeela replied. The dark flames sought their enemy, her carved asklepian cold where their tendrils were sulphur-foul.

"Exactly," she said. "I'd tell you the truth without your spells," she continued, and to the priestess' licking fires it was perfect sincerity. She spoke on. "You didn't even have to trouble to take a wizard; it could have been anyone. Give assurance you'll spare others. You must know of my obligations." One facing a surrender would feel emotion.

Two of the women did not bear the symbols of priests. She looked again in the direction of them, careful glances. One of fiery arrows, one of the darts against Montaron.

"We know," the first harsh tower of armour said. A large shield covered her body, in her right hand a long black knife of the wrong shape to give a clean cut to anything, a thick mace at her belt. "One of those upon our altar was another like you. An adventurous boy who did not even know of his choosing by Ilmater until the very moment Lamalha cut out his heart. Charmingly ignorant."

A tale told to deliberately outrage. Their dark reaches brought what she was into a pale uncoiling anger.

"It offended his sensibilities that he was the last to die at our hands," Lamalha said. "Telka—"

"How many of you want to die?" Prudence called out; loudly enough to interrupt. "Siege the tomb all you like—break your word about the mage—and at least one of you would lie dead at our hands." Her thought was that Montaron would consider himself underestimated at that, and the black tendrils drew that truth from her mind. "Let him go. You'll have your chance to avenge Mulahey upon me.quot;

"Your life for his." The priestess with skin of stone laughed again, the flail she bore gleaming in the sun's glare. "This is rich," she said, her words slowed, her speech chosen as a weapon to hurt. "Did you know that your necromancer belongs as much to our lord Cyric as we, wouldbe paladin? I hope you're none too shocked."

The truth casting sought for that reaction. The reason why Lamalha spoke was to twist a knife. Two hard-faced priestesses; two who chose to aid them. "I've heard him say otherwise," Prudence said. "He ought to know."

"Have no doubt that he knew," Zeela said. "We have rituals to seal the souls of those we sacrifice with our lord for eternity; but even without that Cyric would claim his soul the moment we slit his throat."

The figure upon the ground was silent, of course; had only gasped in pained breaths. Zeela spoke on, opening wounds.

"He claimed to you to be apostate? Small doubt that our lord will treat that with all the mercy it deserves," she said. "But perhaps that makes you change your noble decision?" The dark power pulsed in her voice; a chuckle bloomed in the priestess.

 _No. That's even worse._ Telka held her bow steadily upon Xzar's back.

"Or can you know that he is not ours already?" the priestess taunted. "Perhaps the Prince of Lies commanded him to bring you to us. I see him mad, a necromancer, darkness within him. Certainly he is more the possession of our lord than of any other."

"It makes no difference," Prudence said. _The duty would be for anyone_ ; and they were not ignorant of her laws. "Let him go."

"Then throw down your weapons—and come out in his place," the stone priestess ordered, her shield raised, her flail ready.

Untie the scabbard at her belt; the crossbow; cache of bolts; even the belt knife. Slovenly throwing-down; no need for the customary care. "I've done so," she said truthfully, still beyond the doorway, out of range; watching the tall priestesses, the pair of assassins bearing ranged weapons in hand. "Release him first."

Imoen. "No! You've known him half a tenday! I didn't think you were really going to—and you shouldn't—you can't do this—"

"I need you to look after Xan," Prudence said to her, the recent-rescued Greycloak temporarily uppermost in her mind. The Cyricists could feel the sentiment of the fallen; of regret at Imoen's hurt. Their touch for truth continued to awaken her own sight.

"So our pets harmed you, then. What rats remain in the trap?" the stony Lamalha said, next to the dart-thrower Maneira.

"Enough to harm you." That was true. "What is your guarantee of good faith?" The pale pressure had begun to overflow behind her eyes in response to the Cyricists' presence; and she looked down at Montaron.

Zeela spoke. "Bow and scrape further, wouldbe knight. No doubt it would offend your morals were we to return the mage damaged."

A...genuine threat.

"Will you keep your own pets in order following...post-mortem?" the cleric said, gloating.

It had made Montaron's gaze shift, his glare and her own brief understanding. Sometimes there was no pity in such a vision; his scowl knew her for what she was, and his fingers tightened about his crossbow.

"Montaron," she said, more harshly than she had expected; she tried to contain the white light behind her eyes. "Tell them the truth."

A twisted grin from him; he yelled out to the priestesses. "Sure. Girl's a chance-met a few days ago. Wizard, though, annoying though he be there's folks I know with a use for him. Wouldn't trouble fighting ye on funny ideas of avenging her." A final glance of hostile understanding.

Imoen gasped again, her anger strong. "You rat! I let you teach me three-point pickpocketing distraction—evil scum and I won't forgive—!" Something was broken beyond repair.

"You see," Prudence said, truths sealed to her mind. Maneira and Telka stood ready with their ranged attacks, Zeela and Lamalha in possession of their prayers. "I still can't let anyone perish on my behalf. Not even..." There was much to condemn in Montaron. She sought to calm that particular vision; she had not allowed it full reign to begin with. Her voice remained in composure. "Imoen, do as the _nice ladies_ say." _Imoen, do what you have to survive._

She heard the sound of the stone cracking. Lamalha stepped out of the protective skin, tanned light brown below it. "A lie there!" she laughed. "Zeela," she said, the voice changing to a child's petulance, "I think the knightling's kept us talking far too long. Don't you agree?" She began a brief chant before Zeela gave an answer; her skin quickly greyed into the thick carapace once more.

"Lingers like the harlot Mystra in a mage's bedchambers," Zeela said. "Come with your hands where we can see them. Telka: get the wizard up." Boot lifted, bow raised; Xzar was pushed to walk forward along the path to the tomb, the archers still at his back. No sounds came from his moving mouth, his walk swaying, and the same fear in his eyes as in swearing to the presence of the Dark Sun within the koblds' painting.

 _A liability at present_ , some thought lingered in one of the layers of Prudence's mind, but the Cyricists no longer quite cared to seek her truths. Words, variables, problems that needed cold thought to mend...

"Further," Zeela ordered, and she went beyond where she could scuttle back into hiding within the tomb.

His arms were spread wide; where he stepped there was still no clear shot for the assassins past his body, against her. He came along the same path to the tomb as before, between dry gorse and brown dust, the sun higher in the sky than it had been. Closer, so she could have reached out to touch him; to pass by each other in place for the exchange.

There was very little Prudence had spoken to the priestesses that was not truth; but then she opened her mouth for a lie, and at the same moment moved.

"Friends! You must run from the spirits in the tombs—"

Pushed Xzar into the steep drop, away from them, not too deep a fall; flung herself flat upon the ground. Montaron's crossbow bolts flew above where they had been.

Telka and Maneira: friends by the cloak's power, doing nothing against their nature, warned to run.

 _You'll have your chance to avenge Mulahey upon me._

 _None of them will die here._

 _Greed. Or a distrust of Cyricists._

No chance for miscalculations.

Prudence rolled to cover; got to her feet and sprinted, the opposite direction the cloak had instructed of Telka and Maneira. The enemy knew the ground better; assume Montaron and Imoen did not pierce heavy shields and armour; assume what she'd do. She'd committed only a few moments' worth of shock against them.

 _One to chase the one they consider a target. One to try to eliminate the tomb's archers._

There was cover between the rocks; she sought a route suited for it. Yells behind her, something coming. She ran, and the earth itself shook—a strong power—let Montaron and Imoen not allow their target a chance to cast—

One who knew the ground sought another who ran alone, darting and hiding afraid of her while the four all lived. One way to play hide-and-seek was to turn seeker to ambushed. If one was fortunate; if one knew the prey hid, if one knew the prey would slowly tremble; if one gained enjoyment out of wasting time and watching others twitch and fear...

There was a spot she had seen in one of the brown hills; where a person could scramble to hide and jump down upon a seeker below. She sought to be as silent as she could. Bar for a slight shadow where one should not exist, there was no suggestion that anything lay in wait in that crevice.

Prudence's route turned a full circle, the way the cloak pulled upon its victims to a chosen ground. Confused by the fear of the tomb and the warning; not sure where to go; not looking in the direction of the one who came to them.

 _No time._

Telka and Maneira served Cyric as much as the priests did; and yet they were friends to each other, humans. The cloaked woman drew close to them, but it was not unnatural for them to be giving attention to other things than a friend's approach.

The dartwoman was the more dangerous. "Maneira, look into the sky." _That angle._ She thought the cloak's enchantment easy to control.

 _Throw down_ your _weapons._ Prudence hadn't in detail known of what Imoen kept in her cloak pockets, and found her hand scraping beyond lockpicking tools and across the hilts of three throwing knives.

 _Imoen would never let it go if I missed at this distance._

The knife pierced Maneira's throat. Telka, at her murdered friend, would take obvious action; but her first movement had to be to grasp Maneira, trying herself to stem the wound.

The second knife hit the moving target of Telka's back; the enchantment shattered. In action more demonstrative than practical, Telka ripped the knife from her own shoulder; rushed upon the attacker with it in her hand, a snarl of shocked hatred in her face. Prudence held the cloak's hem, gesturing with it once again.

No charming effect; it worked less well on one with her friend's lifeblood on her hands.

" _You think that will work again, you bitch?_ "

"No. Just trying to distract you." Telka's run had lurched; that was the opening. Prudence had the last of Imoen's knives in her hand, and made the leap to reach her. Both struck. Red soaked the cloak at her left shoulder; and Imoen's knife met Telka's midsection. "Sorry." She was pushing the knife in deeply past the leather armour, twisting with the force that a small blade needed to do damage, peeling down the other arm and gripping tightly— _couldn't let her comrades heal her, had to stop them—_

The body fell to the grass. Telka's own strike had, off-angled, cut ear rather than her throat; it bled copiously. Prudence bent to the corpse.

 _No more time._ The ground shook as if a giant walked. Zeela had appeared; saw two dead on the ground. She'd instantly act. Prudence flung the last knife, speed above any time wasted on accuracy. Zeela raised her right hand, spoke a word, and fragments of iron dust fell to the ground. The bow was wrapped and twisted around the woman's shoulders; Prudence pulled Telka's shortsword from its sheath.

Zeela's chant was loud and fierce. The pattern of gesture something a child of Gorion ought to know in her sleep; the speed too fast to disrupt the caster in time; the angle of her hands and the pitching of her voice, invocation triangulation calculation, divine casting strike point understood—

Half material fire, half divine. One was avoidable by reeling from the invocation point at the precise moment; one not. A black fire covering her, roasting, many times multiplied from the pain of touching the dark blade. She found the ability to heal— _you killed a woman you'd charmed_ , a momentary thought, but still within her she could cast the prayer.

The prayers for a giant's strength did not give the caster a deer's speed with it. Prudence flung herself at the armoured priestess, and the shortsword slid from Zeela's shield. The pair of Cyricists had been too unyielding to try to charm; would have noticed the play of the cloak and flung it off as a metal tower would deflect an arrow.

Zeela fought with her mace rather than the curved knife. It pushed through the air with unnatural strength; caught the edge of Telka's sword and even in that showed incredible force. And in her momentum was perfect control: it was said the weakness of such spells was directing them, but not one of Zeela's movements showed that the strength took her any further than she would have desired. She bore the weight of her armour as nothing.

A matter of dodging. Prudence found that Telka's blade held light enchantment, enough to scratch the plate. The footwork was the same, the range and the blade different to her usual practice. She could barely hurt Zeela; at best would disrupt casting until this opponent realised how dangerous she really was with a shortsword.

She spun sideways against the mace's heavy blow; Zeela tried to lead the battle out of the open area. In the hills she could bring down earth with that strength.

"—I'd urge you to convert even at this stage, but you seem foolish as Mulahey!" Words seemed to flow more easily from her throat with the cloak's power _._ Joints in the armour.

The priestess scorned that. The mace flew down; Prudence thought that at least without her shield she carried less weight— "You ran from me, weakling. Best to die now," Zeela said. Her eyes were black, even the sclera; a sign of the use of power.

"I thought—" Sidestep. Keep to the open. "Thought Cyric was more of an eye-and-hand-and-assorted-teeth-for-an-eye god. Any interesting reasons for me in particular?" The enchantment seemed to make her better able to speak her thought; stronger articulation, phrasings not dying in her throat.

"No answers. I'll crush your skull." Clever enough not to give great detail on those who had sent her. Too distracting to try to look into her. Prudence threw herself aside; managed to roll and stand again. She thrust forward with the shortsword; easily blocked by Zeela's shield.

Improvisation. "—At dinner when I was young I'd sit in my place and make towers out of the carrots and catapults out of bread and stringbeans—the better to fight my sister across the table, you see," Prudence said. The story rambled; almost a bad imitation of Xzar. The Cyricist's glare was as hard and harsh as her mace.

"Shut your mouth." The mace nearly enforced that by force.

"Disgusting behaviour, given children starving elsewhere," Prudence said. "My father taught me not to. It was a very important lesson: you can't win once you start playing with your food." Perhaps disbelief was what put the mace's strike slightly off from shattering her right shoulder. Keep an opponent off-balance. "I mean, I don't believe people are food, I like people. For social interaction, not with a nice Berduskan Dark and some Chondathan beans." Zeela's stance shifted; Prudence knew the counter to that footwork, at least, how to move back and aside in time. Zeela wasn't particularly fast, for all that strength—

"Stand still and shut up!" She'd grasped where the tale was leading, perhaps. A swift underhand strike; Prudence shifted her weight to the left. One didn't put one's body in the way of maces wielded by deity-given strength.

"You lost before you started this." It was reasonable in the abstract. With the cloak, the necessary confidence held in the voice. "Left your friend—Lamalha?—back there, she's going to die. Nothing you left in the tomb did anything permanent. Montaron's tremendously good at what he does. Khalid's even better with a sword. Elven wielder of a Moonblade—magic sword, only the worthiest touch them, in case you don't know what they are." Good; the intellectual snobbery prompted a snarl on the cleric's face, and a fierce blow predictable enough in direction. "Imoen was the best shot in Candlekeep." Were the truth spell still in place, it would have noted uncertainty and worry: Khalid and Xan incapacitated by the horror, Imoen's glories within certain limits. But she did not lie.

High blow from the cleric. Retreating step; scrape the side of the armour with the shortsword. Search for weakness in joints.

"Lamalha's outnumbered five to one, then they'll come for you," Prudence said. "Have any ambush surprises? No, I know you don't. You'd have needed them already." The taunts—seemed to be working; she'd seen some of Zeela's style, started to know herself the patterns of motion.

"They will find your dust when they do," Zeela said. The tower of armour moved forward; Prudence shifted, stepping quickly. More strength than mobility to the cleric's style. Underarm attacks favoured: with borrowed strength the momentum of an overhead strike wasn't much needed. Shield used defensively. Stance firmly planted as if used to fighting where she had to hold ground.

Prudence stepped to the right when the mace struck left; tried to get the shortsword to the chain joints at Zeela's elbow. "I'm not supposed to be afraid to die." Phrasing it any other way would have made that statement less than honest _—of course she wanted to win this fight—_ "Aren't you frightened of what your god will do to you for failure?"

That hit where it was aimed; a glower, the dark eyes almost spitting power from them. "Cyric is the one true god and you will never live to oppose his will!"

Another erratic strike of the mace. Prudence remembered Mulahey, at his last; the nature of the Mad God and his crimes. "Do, am, will," she said, and the cloak helped her force nonchalance to her voice. "Can't stop me," she added childishly, and that seemed to work like Imoen could use it on one of her good days.

"—rraggh—" There Zeela raised her arm, right-handed strike to the left of the skull; her strength making it vigorous, her arm rising. Under the armpits was chain; Prudence moved herself under the blow, stabbed with the shortsword, and the enchanted point cut through that and into the flesh—

Zeela hit back. All the times she'd practiced taking a fall and all the times she hadn't intended to practice it came to Prudence in a shock of pain. Flex quickly with the lines of force, roll back and down, the world spinning—ribs bruised, body cut skidding along gravel, nothing broken at least, needed to rise—

A healing spell chanted by the Cyricist; Prudence heard the casting a little slower than Mulahey, a chance for her to get up again. Then Zeela dashed at her like a madwoman, faster than she had been. And yet more predictable, patterns of rage and losing subtleties of motion.

"May really be—!" Zeela said incoherently, moving in with her mace. Halfway through a blow, she stumbled for an instant, though she still blocked Prudence's attack for that. The strength—Prudence tried a cautious deflection again. Zeela's force was no longer inhuman, if still stronger than her own. "I saw your truth when you pleaded for the necromancer! Remember I spoke truth too—a good chance he'll be Cyric's, forever after—"

So she tried the same technique as her at last. Prudence moved calmly away from the mace's sketches in the air. "You call it only a chance now?" The tone ought to be contemptuous. "Not all chances come off. Thank you for admitting more than you should, yet again..."

"—Just die!" Erratic, again; the point of Telka's sword scored a line across the left shoulder of the plate before Zeela raised her shield.

"Cyric—switched from human mercenary to god," Prudence said. She panted; in some measure the cloak disguised that when she spoke. Zeela's rage endured. "And you can't even kill one. He must be—so proud of you."

 _No time._

She stepped under Zeela's mace; trying to weave for the join of her gorget. Blocked by the mace. It bruised her arm; she was pushed aside. Stumbled; flung herself to the left, staggered to her feet in time to deflect another blow.

The sword and mace met. Prudence raised her arm; she was the taller, though of less brawn. They faced each other; Zeela won in the contest of muscle, her mace pushing heavily down. A high corps-a-corps. They stepped toward each other, and she could smell Zeela's breath. "You...you feign weakness," Zeela said, though that was even as she only tried to equal the cleric's strength in holding the shortsword steady against the mace. "But you are truly—"

Prudence slid the blade free quickly; Zeela's arm slipped, her body out of balance, leaning forward. The chain in her right arm still hung loosened. The shortsword stabbed up and into her armpit; magic enough to pass through. Zeela tried to break away; Prudence flung her weight on the sword. Forward and down, angle for the artery axillaris, lungs, deeper. Heavy plate clattered to the ground; Zeela bled, trying for some moments to heal herself...

The knife she'd seen before still hung from Zeela's body. The wrong length for a dagger or shortsword. The glassy black of obsidian; more prone to shattering in a fight than iron, at least when there was no crisis. Jagged serrations at irregular spots, a lunatic's patterning. A curved twist at the end of it slightly too long to usefully hook an opponent's blade. Not a priest's weapon for war. Not a weapon for war at all. It was a vivid image in her mind for the most fleeting of moments, knives that sliced for pain instead of mere death...

 _Too long. Run._ She grabbed the corpse's shield, and sprinted back to the tomb.

—A roiling black cloud at the entrance of it, writhing snakes of solidified smoke atop and within each other. The stone priestess before it.

"Im! Montaron!" she yelled; not too far from the Cyricist. Worry— _if anything to them_ —

"Hah! Pru!—" The answering cry from deep within it. A great relief;

"Oh—" Prudence affected inattention to the priestess; "you're still here?" Blood on the cloak and Zeela's shield helped with the impression she sought. "Your companions are all dead." _You feign weakness._ As if; intimidation would work far better here. "Now, I'm obliged to accept surrenders—"

 _I killed the others and it would be better to yield now!_ she would have hoped for Lamalha to see in her—wasn't sure if she could win, wounded, and anyway that way she wouldn't kill one more—

But that failed. Lamalha stared at her, and Prudence knew she knew what lay behind her words; and the chant of a prayer began. It must have been an enhancement prayer cast, before Prudence quite reached her to stop her; the flail whirling above her head gathered a dark light about it and sped quickly, unpredictably. Too quick to properly block; it forced Prudence back, and the bluff tattered. No hesitation to the priestess' mad movements, no words but a roaring from her mouth. Lamalha of Cyric left no time to speak.

The flail caught on Zeela's shield, cut ribbons along the length of the metal. It was the circling that made it impossible to predict, the angle where the spiked ball spun into vicious attack. Prudence fell into desperate retreat and attempts of blocking that Jaheira would have caught quickly—that Lamalha was catching quickly. The problem was she'd little experience with the flail, no ability to read the motion and anticipate when the spin would end. It beat away at the enchanted shield, and dug deep like clawmarks. For all the weight of arms Lamalha carried, she was faster than her—the prayer, likely; but the reason why made little difference—

Lamalha moved her backward, away from the tomb and the sharp drop before it. Probably not deliberately; seeking only to strike the blow that would finally kill as quickly as possible. Prudence could read scarce anything beyond rage in the fierce glare. The flail arced through the air again. The edge of her shield, and with such force that it pushed her aside; twisted her left arm aside. She stepped back again. Lamalha left her no time for recovery _._ One had to adapt quickly— The arm wielding the flail rose. Follow that, instead; afraid to be too slow Prudence raised the shortsword, lunged upward and tried to tangle it with the flail's chain. It made the contact intended; Lamalha moved against the direction of it. Their shields clashed against each other. Lamalha untangled the flail, raising it again. She cried three low syllables in a tongue similar to Mulahey's castings; the flail fell. Prudence felt it hit her left shoulder, spikes raking through the chainmail even as she tried to spin back from it.

Pain; but she could still move, still block by the shield's magic. She led Lamalha back again; near to rocks close together, ground uneven. She sought to turn Lamalha left, where potential to trip. She attacked again, trying to slip the shortsword below the whirling flail, close the range between them. But Lamalha was too fast. A strong hit, the iron ball heavy against the shield, and it was Prudence herself who stumbled, falling to one knee, the flail rising to finish the battle. She could hear other movement, she wildly thought, her senses still trying to understand—

Then the stone face stopped; split apart; burned black where it did so, the end of an arrow of fire through it. Lamalha's eyes widened in the stone. The burn did not make her bleed, blackened her; and she toppled to the left, grey eyes staring blankly to the sky.

"Y' cloak-thieving bufflehead!"

Imoen, soot-black, stood out on the ground with the dark smoke still behind her, her bow and a second poised arrow in hand, a strip of cloth held as a scarf over her face. Montaron and his crossbow not far behind her; Khalid and Xan, coughing and spluttering and leaning on each other, Khalid pale and Xan paler below the streaks of black that covered them also.

Imoen ran to her; Prudence stood, half-stunned and smelling of blood, to meet her. No more—yes; the four Cyricists dead, perhaps over, a victory of a sort. _Im, I'm sorry I made you believe, I needed your genuine reaction—_ It wasn't possible to voice that in a way that wouldn't hurt her more, so Prudence settled for a quick hug of her sister. The cloak altered her; she unclasped it from her own neck and draped it back around Imoen.

Then threw herself down the gorge. A steep way down; she took it skidding against the sheer rock, landing feet-first and easily picking herself up. There were hollows in the sides of the wide pit; _Xzar, I know you're clever..._

There the green robes, at the very back of one such hollow, sheltered by the red-brown rocks. His lips continued to move with silent speech; sitting on the ground, both hands wrapped around his left ankle above an unlaced boot.

"You're hurt; is that the worst of it?" She knelt down beside him. "I won't be able to do much, but we'll be back with Jaheira soon," she chatted, inconsequentially. "We defeated them; everyone else is well. It's good you stayed here. _"_ He opened his hands, letting her find out what was wrong; with a broken ankle he couldn't have done much else. The prayer showed her the fracture at the tibia's extremity, mesos malleolus, swollen skin around it. He'd managed to set the bones to where they were supposed to be, and to hold them there himself. Painful, without doubt. She could heal it, with almost the last of what she could store from prayer. "Be careful when you set weight on it. You'll be all right." _I think I promised that._

He spread his arms wide and gestured wildly, still trying to speak. She couldn't lipread with any skill, nor understand the language of the deaf; though it became obvious when he pointed indignantly at his throat, gesturing with fierce emphasis.

"That'll wear off," she said, unable to quash amusement at his pantomime; "It's not physical damage, anyway, so I likely couldn't do much for it." He kept moving his lips, the signs he made more and more complicated. "Contusions on your right arm; just let me..." A shallow scrape where the sleeve was torn, long but not actively bleeding; as gently as she could she cleaned some of the dirt from it with a handkerchief. He allowed her, mouthing words all the while. It was probably wrong to think of a silenced mage as...endearing. "The duration can't be _that_ long; individually less power than Mulahey, I think," she said. Not as utterly insane and lacking in all sense as he; but in the end, equally dead.

"Fetched the mad wizard yet?" Montaron yelled down.

"Yes. We'll be up soon." Whatever animated conversation Xzar was trying to carry with her, it seemed complicated; she shrugged, spread her arms uncomprehendingly, and smiled at him. Xzar jabbed again in the direction of his throat, his silent words flowing as swift as ever; "Well, I can't say you're not making a point," she teased, and slowly rested a hand on his arm. A gentle human contact, after the fight; they lived, and to hold that in mind was relief. He swept a hand in front of her, leaning forward, half resting on her. It was only simple touch, both bruised and stained and exhausted. Xzar seemed as vitally enthused as when he'd brought out the necromantic path to banish the ghosts, or gloated over his spell against the wraith; his long fingers closed about her arm in turn, shifting around it, and together they rose. He stood lightly on the healed leg, leaning against her left side.

A sound something like escaping steam came from Xzar's neck, and a solid croak emerged from his throat; the silence worn off at last. "...and that's why captive astrocytic shining from the tomb..." he spoke aloud; he swallowed, and grinned. "Mysteries beyond the dust? Glories departed?"

"Something like that," Prudence said, and let the blue light gather around her hand again, though the focus of it was all but escaped from her mind. "What's the worst of it left?" Scrapes and scratches; she raised her right hand to his shoulder, making a brief diagnosis now he could talk. "—Your back—" Old signs, not the fall she'd caused. _You have scars..._

He grasped her forearm; pushed her hand away from the touch. To her, the blue faded, capacity for it no longer remaining. "The classic pitfalls of an education in alchemy. Leave it!"

"But those weren't—" she said. He leaned toward her, eyes bright and that particular lock of tawny hair falling across his forehead;

"I said to leave it! The insufferable eyes—" He was close to her, their hands linked; they might have stopped each other talking with a kiss, but— _not like this, not after four deaths_ ; she drew back from that, yet not letting him go, touching and tangled together—

"And you threw me off a cliff!" he added, outraged; it was right to listen—

"Small hill—"

—

 _scrape away the back of an ox eye_ —Experiment originally performed by Descartes.

 _tales that their bread was made out of blood—_ In the original stories, golems were created as a defence against persecution, of which 'blood libel' was one of the myths used. Some 'Faerunising' attempted.

 _haugbui_ —a form of revenant typically found to be guarding tombs, originating in the North

 _One falls down when reasoning is destroyed_ —Bhagavad-Gita.


	7. Epilogue

Warnings: So far this fic has included repeated instances of the protagonists killing people, elf torture, a character's eyes eaten by insects, and a description of livor mortis, so I add no further warnings.

—

"...Two adventurers from Crimmor, and a third boy from east of here, the farms of the Lonely Peaks or thereabouts; never came back. A pair of humans who said they hailed from Waterdeep; and that elf—but you found him; and Galtok, the local gnome who disappeared," Ghastkill said. Perhaps it was the boy from the farms that the Cyricists had boasted of ending upon that altar, Prudence thought; but what grains of truth had lain in their words? On all of the fallen ghouls had been scant traces of their former humanity. One of Ilmater would not have longed for vengeance, but had received it.

"No doubt 'twas relief that at last you contacted those capable of ending it," Jaheira said.

A slight nervousness seemed to grow upon the mayor, and his clasped hands twisted against each other; though with Jaheira that emotion was not extraordinary. "That I did, Mistress Jaheira. Will ye be at tonight's celebration?"

It had been uncomplicated work, to aid in the final clearing of kobolds; no further surprises of rogue Cyricists or half-orc priests. Imoen had seemed rather bored.

"Our task is completed; Khalid and I must be away," Jaheira said. "I daresay the children will not object to it."

Imoen's grin was indeed wide, though she turned to the Harpers. "Couldn't you stay just for the party, Khalid? Y'know what they say about Calishite dancing...well, I guess that's not quite...but you two should come!"

"I am a druid, child," Jaheira said gently; "An iron-mining town is no place for us to linger, and we do not labour for public recognition. Better that we depart for other duties, if you say that you would prefer the Greycloak. 'Tis not mine to question your judgement."

Any flushes to Prudence's cheek were not usually discernible. Probably for the best; that she and Imoen did not especially wish to continue to follow in her wake, no reason that they must burden her and Khalid with duty to Gorion's child. Likewise would Xzar and Montaron leave for their own, and undisclosed, purposes; Jaheira had interrogated upon that point.

 _Khalid claims that you were...adequate, against the Cyricists_ , Jaheira had said, sounding as if she meant to concede something by the comment. _It is your decision. I do wish that it turns for the best, and that you are aware of a way for messages to reach Khalid and I._ Perhaps it could have been different; but this future was one choice to make. (Beware of inns; beware of scrying; let them search for the old group of six if they still would.) Unnerving that Jaheira seemed so often to stare at her as if she was about to combust into something despicable, whether it was more her own fault or that of luckless circumstances.

"A party," Imoen said, walking back to the inn, "part of the Heroes of Nashkel—that sounds good—and you'll be able to look respectable, won't you, Pru?"

"Yes, Imoen." Jaheira and Khalid deserved greater credit; but of course it would be fun.

It had taken some efforts to scrub the blood out of Algernon's cloak; Imoen swirled it jauntily around herself. "I knew there was a reason to bring that dress," she said, "the one with the ruffles."

The truth was that the dress represented a month's labour for Imoen, assembled carefully from a pattern all the way from Waterdeep, but it was too easy a point. "You remembered to bring a pretty dress...and only a few arrows? I'm just saying."

"Well, for just saying, you can bring out your sewing kit and help," Imoen declared. "Some of my...y'know, helpful tools in case people lose their keys...got caught in the seams."

—

Two human children. A ridiculous notion, Xan castigated himself. On reflection, they had been subtle about questioning him in return; asking somewhat dextrous questions about his state and plans, assessing his skills. They did not have no vocabulary of the understanding of magic, though the picklock's speech seemed determined to imitate some typical low human criminal.

"To remain here; at least several days to understand the encodings of the documents—" _and to regain strength_ , he did not say, and they were courteous enough not to tell it to him. "My duty has not changed. To the next step implied, whatever impossible foe that may be to torment us next."

"Then we'd accompany you, if you wish," the taller girl said. "My sister and I. Although—Jaheira and Khalid would also do so; and they've far more skill. But I'm capable of swinging a blade and healing, Imoen's accurate with a bow."

"I have witnessed you walking into four Cyricists, and remaining alive," Xan said. The girl's calm gaze could be somewhat unnerving, in conjunction with a smooth voice. "Though that sort of thing is likely to cause suicidal overconfidence the next time fortune fails to favour one, of course."

"There's a price on my head, for reasons I don't know," she said. "They killed my stepfather. He was once an adventurer; I can only imagine it related to something he did in the course of that. There's nothing I've done that would make anyone want to... Well, except to investigate this, of course, but the bounty existed before it. Still: three might stand more chance than two, for battles ahead." A frank and foolish admission. She gave the impression of a candid directness, whether or not the surface was in reality the entire truth. Nor did she try to look with the dangerous eyes attributed to the profession; no doubt to a human they considered it a great display of restraint.

"And you choose to split the group?" Xan said; the halfling he could hardly be expected to be fond of, nor a human necromancer who _without doubt_ failed to use the discipline in a responsible fashion, though the half-elves appeared by a slight degree more respectable.

"They were my father's friends; good people. But I don't think we merge well, and one may choose to end such a thing," she answered; and, "Think I've heard you saying that line before, Pru," Imoen added in an undertone.

"It seems you offer to help avoid dooms you bring," Xan said. Was it that as humans they could see the basic reasoning that the Cyricist foulness deserved ending, and wished to rely upon his better-informed investigation? Or some bizarre sense of responsibility, as if unpicking the chains and so happening to slay his captor was sufficient reason to continue with him? Or still worse, that he was interpreted as some divine sign by a paladin's fanaticism. "I could not stop you from attempting to aid me," he told them, in the end. "Or that consequences would be significantly worse than otherwise."

A fool's act. He had noted the half-elf pair eyeing him as if a replacement guardian of sorts. He supposed it was likely enough that they were as capable as the humans claimed; he had no obligation to seek them as sentinels for himself. Perhaps he had much the same instinctive reaction as Prudence to that particular tone of Jaheira's voice, though he suspected she would be guilty of much the same domineering air herself if given half a chance. Such minor factors were ill-considered reasons for decision.

"I can heal a little more than I should be able to by prayer," the girl admitted suddenly, as if having decided to confess a crime rather than boast of prowess.

"A slight utility that I cannot imagine would reverse the likelihood of grievous failure," Xan said. Trivia, minor human irregularity; he was sure he had read that even the ones with the most barbaric prejudices against magic made less objection to healing spells. He thought he saw unseemly levity in her face at his reply, a slight smile. The pair of them were blatantly guilty of a pointless and ill-advised optimism.

"You do your research," she said; "and know as much of the ways of magic as any man, Greycloak. Let's find the people responsible—and agree to disagree on chances of success." She stretched her right hand out to him, speaking clearly and easily. It was the human deception of the suicide-monger to cloak innate doom by a superficially convincing voice. He thought it almost patronising that she should speak of his abilities in that fashion when he had studied longer than she would have lived, graduating from both Evereska's college of magic and the Greycloaks' teaching, serving for several full years of local missions before this dispatch south to human lands.

"You are aware enough of duty and reality," Xan said; and surely that was all that needed to be spoken. He had known it was the girl's nature to draw others to her like moths to a dark fire, or weavings into a spider's manipulated web. He briefly sealed the bargain in a human fashion, his weakened hand held by a firmer grip.

"Would it interest you to come to the town's celebration? You found the cause of the troubles," Prudence said.

Xan looked to the document-stuffed chest at the foot of the room's wide featherbed. "I would rather not attend such frivolities," he said; precisely the problem of the elves who failed to give attention to creeping decline and eventual doom whilst the guardians did their work. The opposite of a devotion to duty, but he accepted that such ceremonies existed in elven and human societies alike.

"Then rest in your own way," she said. He supposed the room was the peak of luxury relative to this human frontier: the bed with clean sheets and neatly arranged blankets, a thick if partly threadbare carpet, heavy hangings and a fireplace bringing warmth to the room, a lividly coloured painting of a horse leaping from a cliff and a bookshelf of a few human histories as ornaments, a porcelain hip bath behind a crimson screen. He would not have purchased this for himself, as crude as it was compared to the fine arts of his home. Spacious; quite solitary; windowed to the air, different enough from previous lodgings that he would recover within. "One can't lay plans without it." She produced a scroll from a cloak's pocket: a map of the coast wilderness, where mercenaries had demanded iron from the group, where a probable connection to this plot.

"Useful," Xan said, halfway meaning it; some attempt at forward planning was valuable. "Try not to lose your senses or your head at this provincial occasion," he bothered to caution.

"Instructions to keep you well-behaved, Pru," Imoen giggled; "you'd better come and keep your promise to help fix the seams."

Petty entertainments for petty... He did not think them entirely stupid, though no doubt some of the layers of thought below the paladin's calm and collected mien were dangerously suicidal human fanaticism. _Walked into four Cyricists and away..._ They left him to his own thoughts and rest as he would have wished, themselves in transient cheer.

 _One day another Greycloak shall happen upon the Moonblade and reflect that Xan was right in the end_ , Xan thought; and sat at the oaken writing-desk provided, the first of the encoded documents in his hands. While fruitless and vain to try, it was not boredom that would kill him in this incursion to the Sword Coast.

—

"—It was a half-green-piebald-dragon—" came from Imoen's mouth; she'd embroidered the tale into multiple exaggerated versions, each told with a wink and a smile, at the moment to a young man she danced with. A farmer's lad, Prudence would have guessed, a shock of straw-coloured hair and a face as freckled as Imoen's own above a light brown tunic and breeches. In fact the effect of the festivities was somewhat subdued, Imoen's red hair and bright cloak and dress the most vibrant colouring within the crowd of dancers. The town had been troubled for some time, and a month since had lost their garrison commander. Yet there was quiet hope for all that; two fiddlers and a man playing a hurdy-gurdy gave the folksongs of the region, the dance steps called out for the benefit of all; scented smoke hung warmly in the air of the wooden hall, and beer and mead flowed consistently. She'd danced with miners and farmers and guards herself, trying to defuse pride in herself over what they all had done, and yet glad that it was a deed with meaning for this town. They celebrated that their own work would continue.

Stronger for what lay ahead; willing to face it, perhaps as willing as to smile and dance in physical entertainment. She still carried the scimitar at her side, bound to its sheath in the style of Northern peace-bands used at festivities, white ribbons borrowed from Imoen and tied in elaborate bows that could swiftly fray open. Just people of Nashkel, here, faces belonging to the town; for the moment a rest.

Her glance fell to Montaron: drinking with two other halflings of the town, scowling briefly at her in return, returning to his well-filled cup. Couldn't possibly deny that she'd glimpsed for a moment what he was like ( _in none too much detail, controlled at least against that painful usage_ ). And still she'd worked with that, used it; cooperated with him. She didn't even seem to feel surges of righteous anger, simply disappointment. Couldn't travel with him. Xzar was late here.

"A word with you—they call you Prudence?" The man's voice was soft, and his pose stiff and straight despite the well-worn crutch he rested upon, his right leg twisted and withered. The symbol of Helm's gauntlet at his neck and the light pauldrons across his shoulders made his role in Nashkel clear. "Nalin of Helm. I intend to tell you more of our former commander."

 _Killed his wife, son, and two daughters, and three of the guards trying to apprehend him..._ "And yet the right path is that Brage face atonement, not punishment. Return him to the temple rather than his head to Oublek as others would wish; I would call it your duty, but only you can know that."

 _Already._ A serious matter; but another target at which to aim, a chance to fulfil duty. Her mind could not help shying at the problem it suggested, likely causes of a man to change suddenly, an indirect approach to capture rather than kill.

"When you come to Helm's temple ask more of it. I won't speak further here." Nalin turned swiftly and limped his way back to the hall's broad wooden doors. He forced them open without a backward glance, a blast of cold air released against the warmth of the fires.

"Nalin's a good man, but odd about Brage; and calls for duty all the time," said Efrain Alejo; a merchant's tall son met that evening. "They say that's good for none—not even heroes of Nashkel?" He held out a broad hand.

Agreed; one could dance in the warmth, the called set of the Lord Goblin's Chase; celebrations of change. Hearing tales of a merchant's travels.

Late, she thought again, a gap in the music, leaning against the wall; she caught Imoen's eye once again as her sister told another tall tale, "—A horned skeleton bigger 'n this barn, secret vulnerable spot the exact size of a lump of dried Berculs cheese on the left ribcage like—like all horned skeletons do—"

Prudence hoped the subtle mental communication between them was something along the lines of _Don't do anything to cause Winthrop to kill me; Hey, you can trust me, Pru!_ , as Imoen danced with one of the mine guards.

She slipped out; a quieter exit than Nalin's, into the cold night, walking back to the inn.

—

Two doors to the right; closed. She knocked without hesitation;

"Enter," she heard; and speaking aloud to clarify—

"It's me—" she said.

"High knock. I know," Xzar said. She opened the door, unlocked, to the room lit by his soft green magelight. The spellbook floated open in the air, in front of a barrel-shaped tub, filled by water; out of which rose his bare chest, sketched black tendrils coiling about shoulders and arms as if creeping from his back. Wiry, corded muscle rather than bulk; underfed; tanned; arms folded across his body, aware eyes looking across at her.

"A million strange shadows on you tend; of what substance?" The vivid green eyes narrowed, as if he asked a riddle; she let the door close quietly behind her.

"None that I haven't shaken away; none that I won't." One chose to set high goals. And to spare time for other purposes; it was natural to look. He was a light honeyed brown, lean and—one would not necessarily call him handsome; striking, a lopsided half-smile below the black line around his lips; harlequinlike in different moods, quicksilver and changing.

"And shouldn't you ask of me whether I am truly of the Mad God?" he said quickly, words tumbling over each other in a volatile flow.

Prudence leaned back against the wall, folding her own arms. "I'm afraid I don't think you're a very good liar, Xzar." There were things he violently refused to speak of rather than to tell an easy falsehood; allowed rich words to pour from his mouth of whatever he felt to be true at the time; decried illusion. And she had seen his frightened dismay of that very thing.

He moved his shoulders, rivulets of water dripping from his skin, the book still bobbing lightly in the air in front of him. "Oh, 'tis true I lack the natural talent of some," he said. "Truth may hide itself under a skin but it is always there below the scratch of a scalpel."

"Then allow no illusions," she replied. He had not betrayed for whom he and Montaron worked; and she did not speak of the sorcery that could have given her hands as red as Mulahey, if doing that was not against her code.

"How can that be true when your pulse changes not a beat between words?" In fact she felt it had changed, now; warm blood thrumming through her veins. "But I'm not. I won't be," Xzar said. "Really. Never let them take you! Cyric's an absolute bloody lunatic. Absolute. Bloody. Lunatic," he repeated, punctuating each word with a snap of his fingers, his mouth curling into a satisfied smirk. She made no comments on any ironies. "They don't find you; when the rabbits don't even know you exist they don't trouble to come after you. You escape when there's not enough for them to care whether you chase zygomorphed flumphs or kaleidoscopic ghazal verses or the viridian wax-winged raven. If you don't matter to them," he repeated.

It was Gorion's strategy of hiding by obscurity; it had failed him.

"And yet I've learned; studied the scrolls and know more than I did," Xzar said, and gestured to the spellbook floating before him. "More powerful. This—from the old tomb. My own school. Negative energy at the fulcrum, then the spell makes it split and resolve, bound by ice... Water's gone cold," he added, glancing down at the bath. "The shape can't be a perfect circle because that's too much energy. One has the final form decided from the first of the syllables: increasing radii in wheels, archimedean spirals so the tangent angles change and converge toward a perfect turning—not easy to unravel, they don't spare a step, it's art not patchworked craft, you'd see it—" He actually chanted it, moving his hands into precise gesture, fragments of a cold blue light seeming to skip and spark along his bare arms. She'd not have imagined a scene beginning as it had only to continue like this; but Xzar's eyes were bright and his voice joyous when he spoke of magic, the exuberance a soaring counterpoint to his melancholies. One who was intensely _cheerful_ about crafting necromantic abominations, as Jaheira would have termed it.

A red sphere grew between his hands, then a pale blue core formed around it, cold ice. It hung suspended in the air; the chant strengthened. _A negative core; the ice called around it,_ not _by component..._ His hands stretched evenly apart, echoing the sphere's shape in the space between them. At the last syllable of the spell he touched, lightly, the surface of the sphere with the glowing red heart. The simple circle multiplied itself at that last moment, in growth that had seemed to appear from the air rather than organically metamorphose. It was a web of glowing strands. Strings of blue ice surrounded the red below, growing as a barrier that stopped neatly against the walls and floors of the inn's room. Small icicles hung from the structure like tiny pins. It seemed to tremble with internal contradiction, the red bound to the light blue that held it; and yet it remained in place, a spiderweb shield. Behind which he stood, drops of water running down his body.

"The cold is...displaced?" Prudence said; she stepped forward, and careful not to touch the structure itself reached out a hand. She'd worn no gloves to the dance. The air around the web's strands was warm on her skin, pleasantly so. Xzar nodded enthusiastically, his hand also by the web from his side.

"No components required; only necromancy and temperature displacement, that's why it's so elegant. And yet what I do is unravel things, change and destruction and transformation..."

Prudence lowered her hand a little further, and felt the chill of the ice; the magic separated the natural forces in the air, bringing this manifestation—no doubt of limited duration, for the way the flows of the universe tended to strive to balance themselves. Presumably evaporate rather than melt to damage the wooden floor, the practicality flashed across her mind. "So its purpose is defence," she said, and made as if to reach for his hand on the other side; then withdrew in time, for slim needles of ice spiked across the gap in the web. The red animation flowed inside them, the shapes much less fragile than mundane ice; a sharp tip had caught the cuff of the linen shirt she wore, and cloth rather than ice seemed likely to give way. The space between the points was small enough that few projectile weapons would pierce. The shards withdrew to their branch some moments after the immediate threat was taken from them, sliding back to their normal form.

"...And the necromantic energy within would hurt normal weapons trying to break through, of course!" Xzar said with pride.

"And would it take other forms?" Prudence said, her intellectual curiosity balanced against simpler drives. It wouldn't be notably useful if an enemy could step around it in a space larger than the inn's bedroom.

"There's elements in the spell that shape it to environment—I _think_ it would wrap around somehow, in the open, but it needs hills or trees or things to hang to. I'm...still working on that," Xzar admitted, leaning forward in the bath.

Prudence looked once more at the structure; "So the key must be its symmetries," she said. "I don't doubt it protects its own core. But imbalance, I'd think multiple disturbances..."

Xzar's eyes widened; he nodded. Prudence reached to a gap at the top of the web, provoking the ice's defence but reaching back in time; to the lower left by a half-hearted kick, upper right... It could not convey its energies in time, drawing too much upon the web's core; provoking its defences far apart from each other quickened the dissolution. She found herself near him.

"The reason why I came," Prudence said, standing close to his naked chest, looking across at his face, "was to remind you of the celebrations." The spell parted them no longer, and he watched her calmly; they stood eye-to-eye. "You've done a good thing, you and Montaron, and I think it would be good for you to see that," she said honestly. "Besides, you'll likely catch a cold from standing there so long."

"That? —Ah, pass me that robe..." It was closer to a dressing-gown; Prudence raised a hand overelaborately before her eyes, blocking very little. Candlekeep was quiet, but she'd had some extra study of anatomy—call it by true name, brief relationships predicated on transience, that she expected to leave as much as travelling visitors to it.

He sat on one of the beds; fresh ink stained a twisted pillowcase wrapped around a silver vial. The covers of the spellbook flew into his wet hands, to be folded and hidden under the pillow. _You still won't explain who you work for_ , Prudence reminded herself; bittersweet, this ending. She liked him, and wouldn't have wished to change that; unusual insights and cutting wit and excited energy; iconoclastically and and thoroughly himself; to an extent in need of looking after, though he had Montaron. Perhaps it was better for one to set one's eyes to the future; she knew she did not often brood on pasts and surrendered possibilities. Duties and goals of travel had been more important to her, and remained so whether or not it was cold to think it. "There's dancing," she said, and sat beside him. "You might enjoy it."

"Numbered as one of many knightly skills?" Xzar said; he leaned slightly toward her, a mocking glint in his eyes.

"No," she said—a thing rather foreign to academic monks; "But it's the kind where they call out the steps, so it's easy to pick up. Do you dance?" He was fleet-footed enough for it; but one imagined him in decorous ballrooms as little as...well, as little as Candlekeep was possessed of decorous ballrooms. (Which had caused the occasional complaint from visiting nobles who probably shouldn't have visited.)

"I don't think I remember," Xzar said meditatively, as if he surprised himself. "In the lumber room of the mind one moves away useless rubbish, pushes aside before it all comes tumbling down. I take it you...danced away the evening?"

"Yes; with a lot of nice townsfolk; it's fun," she said. They were flesh and blood as well as mind; physical exhilaration was natural for one to take joy in. A good, she thought it; certainly not evil to feel.

"How banal," he scoffed; and they'd moved more closely together, almost touching. The room was a bright, natural yellow; a fire was lit behind a grate, glowing, the smoke escaping from a pipe above. "If one were to be sensible and rational..." he began.

"Go on," she encouraged.

"Elaborate difference," Xzar said simply.

"You must know what Montaron's like." It had to be said. She saw his expression stiffen.

"More so than you," he said. "Divinational fallacies see a thing for what it is but believe it negates choice..."

"Always a choice," Prudence said. So often the good was also the practical, if one could see far enough.

"Some things you can't escape from. Some rabbits you'll never shake off," Xzar said, and it seemed a melancholy came upon him. "I did nothing to him; but they made me to feel I lay in the domain once more; and would as his pawn."

The priestesses. "If it helps," Prudence said, "I believe in some form of cosmic justice. I'm rather obliged to. That no finite deed can ever be punished by eternal captivity; that none can claim your soul if you do not choose it. Not even Cyric." Xzar had spoken the name himself; she echoed it. _That those who were murdered have gone to their rightful rest, not tormented by that evil deity..._ "Cold comfort, I know," she realised; "I'd not have seen you dead." She slipped an arm around him _._ He'd vulnerabilities; she couldn't condemn him on the basis of acts, and especially not to take the Cyricists as absolute truth.

"Imoen can't stand me," he said.

"Parallel to Montaron," she pointed out.

"Never have worked anyway. I can't abide crowds of people. No dancing." The conversational tempo quickened, animated once more.

"I don't care much for isolation."

"Much safer. I'd have said that before the Cyricists," Xzar added, leaning closer.

"Excellently deduced."

"I could also explain that I'm not quite mad _enough_."

"Careful. I could explain the same thing."

"You're leaving," he said; yet another twist and turn to their words.

"Yes. How sincere does _I want you to travel safely and take care of yourself and meet other people who don't want to hurt you_ sound?" There was a part of her mind conscious of other responsibilities, stepping onward and elsewhere; but what she spoke was true. In the moment she lived it was more than pleasant to sit here, the lines of his body relaxed with hers. _You're clever; you won't be alone; you won't be chased..._

"Very. You're saying it," Xzar said. "Try not to get turned into non-sapient undead?"

He watched her expectantly, head tilted to the left, as if he thought it a standard benediction. A— _characteristic_ expression of his interests; she couldn't stop herself laughing, her head bent down, realising that it was difficult to seduce someone while madly snickering. "A...kind thought..." she managed; it was perfectly true that none wanted that fate, and yet...

"Unbusinesslike; but this is outside such realms," Xzar said, with relative staidness.

"Unchivalrous of me—" Prudence gathered herself together. "But this is inside a convenient space for it..."

She slowly leaned forward to cover his mouth with her own, and felt response; he kept his eyes open while his face pressed into hers, movement deliberate and fervent and sure.

"You're warm," he said, stopping to take in breath, damp himself and slippery. He looked at her, eyes bright by the fire's glow, fully aware. He raised his left hand to her face, tracing lines of feature as if to study it; he smiled like a contented cat. "Bright light in here. That's good." So that helped him. She liked the warmth; this was the right sort of moment, clean and peaceful and within the inn. They sat on the bed; it was easy to fall to the sheets, let it continue.

It was complicated, gently paced. Xzar's fingers twined around her head, sketching unusual patterns between her ear and neck like quick dancing. She eased the robe away from his chest, lines of muscle and strength on him despite his lean build. Their faces met again; eager, sliding around each other, hardly breathing, tongue slipping. He was alert and fast, fumbling—no; rather deft; nimble in mouth and hands.

Probably ought to...unfasten the swordbelt. She slid it away, leaving warfare behind. She liked this as intimacy separate from violence, mutual attraction; one did not have to swear vows of chastity and it was lively joy. His face was alert, movements purposive, mouth and teeth moving down from collarbone to bared shoulder. She held him closely, her hands moving down his body. She smelt sweat besides soap and dampness, the range of human senses open and stimulated. Wholly awake, wholly alive, wholly focused upon this; this was no dream at all, his green eyes glittering and a host of physical sensations too exhilarating not to be deliciously real. She felt the lines of the black tattoos above his shoulders, hands on damp skin, their bodies willingly shifting against each other—

"...Your elbow's in my ribs."

Practical; undramatic. She moved, and they laughed at each other, fragments of conversation punctuating between— _Yes, Rue; Xzar—_

—

The sun's light had thoroughly seeped into the inn, covering the room with gold in a morning late for people who worked chores. Imoen spread the cheese across her bread, lazily breakfasting, Arren the maid being very nice about bringing her things. (She could get used to this. She and Pru were adventurers now; maybe they'd never wait on tables and work in the kitchens again like they'd done back in Candlekeep, though since she knew what it was like she'd had a nice chat to the Nashkel girl about pastries.) Somewhere in the course of the party last night it seemed she'd somehow managed to gain the reputation of the Heroine of Nashkel. Single-handed destroyer of a half-piebald-green-dragon-with-paisley-spots; defeater of five horned demons by the clever throwing of a lump of lettuce leaves; cunning rogue unlocking rich young handsome human princes from many chains and laying deadly traps for their captors with nothing more than three feet of copper wire and a piece of string... It was fun to reshape events into something more exciting and laugh and giggle when the exaggerations got too much for even the most gullible to take in, though this time she might have let it get a little out of hand compared to when she teased Puffguts or Parda or Tethtoril back home. Still, if Nashkel town remembered Imoen the Pink Master Rogue rather than Prudence the Bl—Pru the really more of a well-washed dark grey, that'd do her sister a favour. Hmm, Pru the Dark Grey; turn that into the Dark Grey Prune and you'd really scare people away by means of icky fruit. Hopefully including nasty assassins.

Imoen took another bite of her meal and a sip of honeyed milk, trying not to think about...Pru's approximate whereabouts. She'd gone to sleep very responsibly herself, walked with a nice pair of guards going back to their barracks just beyond the inn at some hour in the early morning, had a few drinks and a lot of storytelling. They were different that way; Pru seemed to like it, Imoen had other hobbies and lots of other things to do. Her sister was even usually a bit too cold and practical about it, pointing out in that trying-to-be-sensible way that was much more annoying when she had a point than when she didn't: _You're leaving Candlekeep, I plan to leave Candlekeep, we already knew that, I wish you well but we should be reasonable and call it over._ Almost as if she picked 'em on the basis of easy-to-break-up-with and not-tempting-enough-to-skip-sword-practice-for, even if she didn't think of it like that. But crazycreepy necromancers...that she _talked_ to.

 _—and Namer Galvan finally showed me the frog dissection! You can find the intestines and the liver and the lungs, though those are small because frogs breathe differently, through their s..._

 _—Of course I'll stop, Im, but we both clean Winthrop's chickens, I don't see the logic..._

— _It's where the nerves are under the skin, when they cut... Never mind. Though the reason for studying it's healing people, that's important... How were those cinnamon cookies, Im?_

'Course, most of her sister's time was on learning new sword-moves and obnoxiously nagging certain glamorous rogues with better things to do to come jogging, or on reading the boring books on theology and tactics that she'd substituted for the boring books on magical theory they'd both laid aside. And Pru wouldn't have the pair of them: because of whatever she'd seen in Montaron by looking out of the creepy white eyes, because Imoen was looking after her and making sure of it.

But there were _voices_ in the halls; two tall silhouettes leaning into each other in the shadows of the stairwell.

"...Exactly! Any sufficiently complicated metaphor is in retrospect indistinguishable from advice that would have been much more helpful beforehand. So the ultimate rule of divination..."

"For justice, not fate."

"For one's own choices. Can make it up—sable figures crisscross the land, you draw a sword, step into the underworld and slay your own reflection—means anything from underground adventuring to inner Blackguard. Or the dark queen across midnight towers the already dead rippling... No."

"Shush," Prudence said, one hand sculpted around his cheek, and kissed him. For a horribly troubling length of time, Imoen could not help but notice. Perhaps she'd use a standard threat of _Stay away from my sister or I'll stab you in your sleep_ ; or more poetically with the first wordy thing that came to mind, _She is a tigris lily seared to charcoal by flame and she will rip out your heart and stamp on it again_ , whatever the original bardsong had meant by the overblown metaphor. Perhaps it meant that a paladin could be as ruthless with themselves as they were with anyone else. She wouldn't really stab anyone in their sleep, of course. So instead Imoen cleared her throat as menacingly as she could, with subtext of _That's my sister you think you can do that with, so you'd better think again!_

They stepped back, though they still stood together, arms unobtrusively knitted with each other. Imoen could have gone with, _You're a creepy dark seductive seducer of my sister's dubious innocence_ , or with the other way around of _She eats lovers alive and spits out their bones except for the part where she tries to be nice and sensible and reasonable and Candlekeep isn't exactly the pleasure capital of the West._ She settled for her fiercest glare.

"Where _did_ Monty get to." Xzar patted down the component pouches on his robes as if he'd somehow hidden the halfling in there; maybe she really shouldn't think any more about that comparison, Imoen decided.

"Come, wizard, I'll not miss the witnessing of yer inevitable death." Montaron was as grimy as ever, his pack hung from his shoulders, heavier than when he'd come here. His face was set to a very strong scowl, Prudence included in it. Imoen shrugged. _Good riddance. Definitely not the sort of rogue I'm aiming to be._ Khalid was nice and he'd been right when he said everyone deserved a chance, but Pru carried that sort of thing too far—or else just thought they were _fascinating_ to _watch_. "Stick everything where it should be and away from the holy-dunce."

"Take care," Prudence told Xzar, and kissed his cheek that time.

"Ambrosia; I—" Xzar stopped talking for once, patting down his cheek. He looked...surprisingly happy below the tattoos, Imoen thought. Tranquil for once rather than fiddling with some magic he probably shouldn't be fiddling with. And they were _gone_.

Imoen considered her sister's expression, sitting down with her and passing the oatcakes. Sleek and smug; never deliberately and provocatively smug about this sort of thing, to give her fair due; perhaps slightly subdued, or in any case as subdued as one could be whilst eating buttered oatcake.

Imoen readied her remarks, and let fly. "Let me guess. You thought it would be a good idea to detect if he had evil tonsils. With your tongue," she began.

"Very funny, Imoen." No smile cracked.

"Really lowering your standards—let's say, six feet under?" Imoen hazarded.

"Don't you think that's a little cruel and mean, Imoen?" Prudence helped herself to the honeyed milk, but made a face at the first sip; preferred it separate.

"Well, at least one of you has rotten taste...ew, pun definitely not intended there," Imoen said.

"I'll probably never see him again." Prudence's shoulders slumped; but she dared more of the milk.

Imoen hesitated on claiming that Pru'd used Xzar and dumped him and wasn't that just terrible of her, but decided on what was true for herself: "I really didn't want to go on with them. Reckon that part of it's all right," she said. "Did you...y'know, look at him like you did Monty?"

"Montaron was...part accidental," Prudence declared. "Xzar didn't cast any sights on me, and they helped Nashkel, and us." She looked at Imoen across the table, keeping her voice low and serious. "You're the one I'm dragging into danger, Im. And Xan, but those behind the iron crisis have to know he was there."

"Yer not buffleheaded enough to leave me behind," Imoen said, toasting with her sweetened milk. "Couldn't get along from moving up from gloomy elves to rich handsome princes without me."

"About ninth hour, isn't it?" Nobody could look at all emotional or dramatic while cutting into oatcakes; Prudence sliced efficiently into her breakfasting. "I'll make tea; then go to Nalin. He wants Brage captured... You don't remember any cryptography, do you, Im?"

"The art of writing or solving codes," Imoen quoted glibly, "not more than that definition."

"The same. So the two of us for Brage, then; Xan ought to be safe enough here, and that makes us more difficult to find. We're not trackers, but the Watcher knows that..." Pru was _planning_ something, Imoen thought; looking much more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed than she really had a right to. Trying to seek the next quest, go after this thing like she'd fling herself into sword practices that lasted hours into the night or learn pages and pages of anatomical treatises in Old Chessentan. "Grisly detail on Brage: one of the soldiers he killed was cut shoulder to pubis in armour," Prudence said. "The two others in but one blow, and that also severing mail. And he probably wasn't casting."

Imoen had heard the outline of the story; she made a face at the horror. "Strength of a madman," she said—no, better not to _go there at all_ , and to be fair she didn't actually see any icky-yet-highly-mockable twitches about Pru. "Or someone external or the weapon he was using, fine." She knew perfectly well what point of magical theory her sister was trying to run down.

Prudence nodded. "Exactly. Not enough information yet; but why Nalin thinks Brage redeemable, and why Nalin's not been explaining this to Brage's successor and the rest of the garrison..." She shrugged. "Any ideas on rope traps, Im?"

Yeah; that'd be the details of the next crazy adventure running through her sister's deranged brain behind that overly gleaming smile and wide brown eyes, not quiet brooding. "Yep," Imoen said. "See, you'd be all lost without me..." There was noise coming from the first rooms of the inn; voices talking and some mention of a horse to be stabled. The innkeeper, his granddaughter Arren, a third who spoke in a tenor voice that carried well.

"A rider through the night," Prudence said, and Imoen decided reluctantly against reminding her that it was wrong for paladins to eavesdrop. The man entered, presumably the traveller who had spoken. Imoen saw above a flowing dark cloak a pale face and clean, long black hair, very bright red lips below a narrow white nose.

"Too nice-dressed for a messenger," Imoen said, noting the cut and fineness of his clothes, only somewhat muddy at the bottom. One would describe him as wearing the same general colour scheme that her sister claimed made for easier washing, but on him it was a shiny and glossy jet black that probably took much efforts of upkeep instead of Pru's dusty dark greys. It made him look rich enough to afford such efforts, though. He wore no rings on his well-manicured hands, but on his right wrist and half-concealed by the sleeve glinted a wide band that Imoen thought stood a good chance of being genuine gold. Those scarlet lips were the sole spot of colour upon his face and moved wetly, glinting by saliva when he ran his red tongue across them. He wore a lute strapped to his back; perhaps a wealthy bard. An axe was holstered at his side, too.

"And yet an errand that made him ride past bandits comes only here," Prudence said quietly.

"D' you think that's paint he's wearing?" Imoen said, of course discreetly. Heard sermons from Puffguts and Mr G. both on that topic (unfair, of course; with Pru most people just _assumed_ she didn't need lecturing, and yet Imoen Winthrop couldn't hardly get away with _anything_ ). But if strange adventuring men got away with it no reason she couldn't brighten herself up, just on special occasions...

"No, I think it's just the way he looks," Pru whispered back, a little absently. The man's expression was casual enough, though when he glanced at them his eyes were dark and icy as Imoen looked back. Prudence continued to slice through her bread with her knife.

"We decided before that it was time to move on," Imoen heard her sister softly repeat. Prudence looked up at the man, smiling brightly; and he stepped toward them.

—

 _Millions of strange shadows_ —Sonnet 53, context not relevant

Thanks go to Scarabbug for reading bits from this fic before posting, and thanks to all reviewers for their comments. :)


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